Once in a while, the internet throws up something magical.  I was browsing Pinterest recently and came across a set of fabulous stencils designed for pumpkin carving by BHG.  Follow this link and it will show you magical pumpkins, alight with characterful faces of every dog breed imaginable, and free to download.  nb If you have any trouble accessing the original link (some geographies may), try this one instead).

The idea of carving them was a bit beyond my skills, but Harry and I cut up the stencils and then drew around all the individual shapes onto scraps of paper instead, to build a fun set of doggy collages..

  We started by printing of sheets of the dogs we liked the most, and then cut out the various features (eyebrows, shaggy hair, button noses..), before tracing round each one onto a piece of scrap paper.  I keep a drawerful of interesting leftover paper for projects like this; we used newspaper, old cookbook pages, giftwrap scraps and so on. For the tiny eye pupils, we used a hole-puncher after discovering that neither of us could cut teeny-tiny circles freehand

Once we had all of the doggy features cut out, we played around laying them in different shapes to create different expressions, before finally glueing them into a permanent arrangement.  Harry used a stick glue; I used a runnier paper glue – either works very well.

We were so pleased with the end result that I scanned a couple of the best collages and then printed them onto cardstock to make cards we can use to send to friends and family.  The envelopes are basic white envelopes that I lined with giftwrap (I have one of these sets of envelope liner templates which I use all the time for things like this…one of my better investments!).  

This is a lovely weekend afternoon activity, and one with endless potential for creating something unique.  Once you’ve mastered these, have a look at the extraordinary dog collages created by artist Peter Clark, who takes things to another level entirely..

Have a wonderful week; good luck to all of those braced for the start of a new school year (take a deep breath).