Next Steps...

Now I have covered the basics and made some simple cut out items I want to try something more interactive and more complicated.

My bookmarks and cut out dolls are great decorative items and nice objects to accompany my book, but they aren't very interactive for children to play with. I want to create some more items and games like my mix and match card game.

I'm thinking about how I can make my cut out dolls interactive, perhaps by finding a way of making the limbs move. I also want to look at some other card games I can make using my theme of wanting to be something. 

I also want to look at ways of presenting my work in a way that I could sell them or give them out as promotional material. The bookmarks would be fine to give out as they are, but I need to think of ways of packaging and presenting my card game and my cut out dolls.

I think with the cut out dolls I would have to present them printed on the card with a dotted line for where to cut, but I would also need to include instructions with this and I would have to consider whether young children would be able to cut them out themselves. Another option would be to perforate the edges of the doll so you could tear them from the paper. I did some research into how and where I could get my designs perforated, and found that you can buy scissors and tools that you can use to perforate edges yourself. Scissors are too big for what I want to cut, they would be fine for straight lines but for cutting anything small or intricate they would be completely useless, so instead I started looking at the tools.

I found that almost all of the tools were essentially just a sharp point that you press into the paper repeatedly around the edge you want cut, and decided that this was nothing I couldn't do myself with a craft knife and a bit of practice. 

First I tried it with the point of a compass, but I found that this wasnt really sharp enough, and didn't make enough of a hole in the paper to get a clean tear. 

Next I tried it with a scalpel knife, and found that after a bit of practice this worked really well, however this is a time consuming job, and although this is fine for a one off piece it is not something I can realistically do for many pieces of work