Personalised alphabet board book for Lily

Lily is the 18 month old (as at Christmas 2009) daughter of friends, Alphonse and Michelle, in London. Using photos of Lily posted online by her adoring parents, a blank board book, adhesive photographic paper and Photoshop, I (secretly) created this personalised alphabet book. (I have pixelated faces for privacy.)

When unwrapped on Christmas day, Alphonse wrote: "Lily’s gift from you is exceptional and drew gasps of admiration from us all. Perfect time for her to receive it too, as she is, of course, massively interested in herself and her immediate world and is becoming interested in letters. Would love to know how you did it." All I can say is thank goodness they had a cat named Viola!

Christmas cards a five year old can make (with a bit of help)

Thomas wanted to make Christmas cards for some of his classmates and teachers, so we decided to make them together.

We've marbled paper before using the shaving foam and food dye method, so we decided to make marbled Christmas tree shapes on cards. This is how:

1. Marble your paper. Obviously for a Christmas tree, greens are going to dominate. This one had yellow swirls in the green, but red swirls were more seasonal (you just have to be careful not to swirl too much and end up with murk).

2. Grab a stencil - or a cookie cutter - in the appropriate shape, and trace around it.

3. Here's the cutter and the tree shape cut from the paper. Depending on how simple your shape and how dextrous your child, get them involved in cutting out.

4. Lots of Christmas trees.

5. Stick them to blank cards. We added a gold star at the top for a finishing touch.

6. Other uses for marbled paper, cookie cutters and blank cards. The dinosaur shapes are very useful for using up "murky" coloured marbelling, and make great boys' birthday cards.