EASY CARE CACTI

Ok so Catcti are a pretty easy care plant to begin with these these ones are even better! You never have to water them AND they wont prick you, AND they can be made from things you have around the house.

What you need

• An old pair of stockings
• Paint
• An old tin or plastic container
• Some cardboard
• Cushion stuffing
• elastic bands

TO MAKE

1. Start by cutting the body section off your stockings, leaving you with two long legs.

2. Grab hand fulls of cushion filling and insert it into the stockings, making sure to push it all the way to the end of the stocking.

3. Once you have filled the stocking about half way start grabbing sections of the stuffed stocking and tying them off with elastic bands. you may need to add more filling each time you tie off a new section. Keep going untill you think your catus may not be able to support itself anymore. Trim the excess stocking.

4. To add sections off to the side of the cactus grab the excess stocking you have trimmed and tie a know in the end. Stuff this piece and tie off in smaller sections as you did with the main body of the cactus. Stretch out the remaining stocking and wrap around one of the sections of the main cactus and secure with an elastic band.

5. Once you are happy with the shape of your cactus you can paint it. DISCLAIMER: You need quite a lot of paint for this. The paint tends to soak in a bit so a surprising amount of paint is needed. You could try spray painting it, but hand painting creates a better effect I think. I used a mixture of light and dark green and painted the little knots in the stocking pink and yellow to look like mini flowers.

5. Find a suitable place to dry them. Ours took overnight to dry so don't plan on doing any washing if you use the washing line like we did!

6. Paint your tins. You can do whatever you like here. Leave it plain, paint on a Mexican pattern or add on some felt shapes when dry.

7. To finish, pop your cactus into your container and find a new home for it!

Paper flowers

These are totally optional but quite fun and they do give the cactus a bit of extra pizazz.

1. Cut a circle of coloured paper. The size doesnt really matter, just scale to the size of your cactus. around 5-10 cm in diameter is a good range though/.

2. Draw a spiral starting thin and gradually getting wider towards the center

3. Cut along the spiral

4. Starting at the smallest end roll up tightly till you reach the center. The circle bit in the center just wraps around the cone shape you have made. Secure with a little tape.

5. Squeeze a few finished flowers into the folds on your cactus.  If they dont stay put, add a bit of glue to secure them.