Christmas Craft Challenge 2011 - Day 15

I'm a great proponent of recycling, reusing and re-purposing especially in my crafting. (I'm not so hot with sorting my recycling for the rubbish collection, but nobody's perfect).
I don't know about anyone else but in our house we seem to go through toilet paper like its going out of fashion which means of course that we end up with what can seem like thousands of toilet roll tubes. 
I've made toilet roll albums in the past... these still need some work for me to be happy with the end result but then I know I am a perfectionist.
During one of my many, many, MANY trolling the internet sessions on Pinterest I saw these really cool ornaments. Not only do they use up the toilet roll inner tube, but these are a great craft for kids to try.

1. Find some toilet roll inner tubes without any toilet paper dregs stuck on them. It just looks tidier on the end result.
2. Squish the tube flat - I used my fingers for the first bit of squishing, then finished off with a bone folder to clean up the fold. For kids you can just use finger pressure.
3. Measure along the tube to get six even slices of tubes. I made my slices 15mm wide and ended up with about 10mm left over... bin this bit.
4. Cut along each line to give you six rings. Re-shape these slightly to give you an oval shaped ring.
5. You can then colour the rings inside and out if you want to. I painted mine both inside and out. If you are doing this craft with kids you could try fingers painting or crayons instead... just make sure you have plenty of protective paper down. Using acrylic paint, the first was well dry by the time I finished the last one.
6. Now the fun of putting them altogether. The trick to making this step easier... paperclips!!! Use the paperclips to hold two rings together, joining all the rings into a six-pointed star. Using the paperclips you can keep rearranging the loops until you get the loops linked the way you want.
7. Once you are happy with where the joins will be... remove one paperclip noting where the tape needs to be. Then adhere double sided tape in exactly the spot where the paperclip held the two loops together. I used Wondertape. It is incredibly tacky and will hold anything together. I found it was perfect and I didn't have to wait for the glue to dry... always a bonus as we all know how impatient I am!!!
8. Repeat step 7 to join all six loops together.
9. Finally add a small hole using your trusty Crop-O-Dile into what will be your top loop. Thread through some string to use to hang your ornament with. I did find I needed to add beads to stop the threads passing through the hole in the top of the loop. For a kids version, you could just tie the string around the top loop rather than worrying about a hole.