Stained glass butterfly loveliness tutorial!

Thank you for all your lovely comments on my last post about the industrial quantities of tissue paper we had been purchasing...I hadn't intended to create a crafting cliff-hanger...I was just too tired to write the rest of the post at that moment! Anyway, you may remember that for Mother's Day Zebra-girl had made me a card at school, holding the most beautiful detachable heart for me to hang in my window... I have loved looking at it, and she very much enjoyed making it, so we decided to create a collage for our glass playroom doors using similar techniques...and a few others, as the project took on a life of its own! We schemed to create a butterfly garden...but it soon became a home to ladybirds, caterpillars and flowers too. It was such fun that I've decided to make it into a proper tutorial in case you find yourself craving gluey fun that spans a couple of days. But before we start, eyes left for what our final collage looked like, just so you have an idea of which direction the tutorial is going in!

Step 1:: Use a paintbrush to cover a thin plastic bag with PVA glue.

Step 2:: Tear up different colours of tissue paper to cover the bag. The important thing to remember is that although you're not purposely trying to overlap the pieces, you don't want to leave any gaps!

Step 3:: Once you've covered your bag, go over everything with another layer of PVA glue. Don't worry overly if it crinkles up your first layer slightly...this will only add to the lovely textures on the final piece.

Step 4:: Now use more bits of tissue paper to create a second layer. You don't need to match the colours to the ones beneath...the loveliness of the final creation is that you can see lots of different colours layered on top of one another. Remember though...no gaps!

Step 5:: Now go over that layer with a final layer of glue to seal it all in...and then leave it overnight to dry. (At this point on the heart that Zebra-girl made for me at school they sprinkled glitter on...we didn't do that as it was feeling messy enough already!).

Step 6:: Step 6 is so much fun that I forgot to photograph it. Peel a tiny corner of your dried paper up and then pull the bag away from it (rather than pulling the paper away from the bag, if you see what I mean...it's just easier that way). Amazingly it comes away all in one piece (that's the reason why not leaving any gaps is so important) and is intensely satisfying and very quick to peel off.

Step 7:: We chose butterflies for our stencil shape...but obviously, you can choose literally anything! We used felt tips to draw around our stencils (yes, the stencils are biscuit cutters...now thoroughly washed and disinfected!).

Step 8:: Once you've traced around your stencil you can cut your shape out. The paper you've created is quite strong and so won't break under the pressure of little hands grasping it tightly as they wield their scissors around it.

Step 9:: Place your creations somewhere where you get lots of natural light shining through them. We stuck our butterflies onto the glass with blu-tac...but you can also thread them with cotton and have them dangling if you have hooks to do so. We put our blu-tac in a thin line down the centre of our butterfly so that it would look like the darker centre of the butterfly's body.

There are cathedral doors leading to our playroom and so we were able to create a 3D collage by sticking some things on the first pane of glass for the foreground and some things on the second for the background.

To complete our collage I cut out large flower shapes for Zebra-girl and Dinosaur-boy and they scrunched and glued on small balls of tissue paper to create colourful, vibrant loveliness.

They made stalks, leaves and grass from green sugar paper and the children each made a ladybird to go on their own leaf.

In the long grass Zebra-girl placed a caterpillar.

They loved doing this project (even down to the smallest things such as sticking on the blu-tac) and spent a long time admiring it once it was completed. Unfortunately taking photographs toward a window is never easy...even with the blind pulled down to try and cut a little of the light out...so the pictures don't do justice to the vibrancy of the colours or how delightful it is when the sun shines through the butterfly's glossy layers of tissue paper....