Handmade cards with hanging heart Christmas tree decoration

These Christmas cards combine techniques from two of last year's craft projects to make a lovely Christmas card with a removable Christmas tree decoration.

They're very simple and all you need is

• White card
• Wrapping paper
• PVA glue
• Wool or string
• Needle

1. Begin by ripping the wrapping paper into smallish pieces. If the paper has words or motifs on it, such as snowmen, try to keep a few of these whole and put them to one side.

2. Fold the white card down the middle

3. Draw a heart on the front and cut this out - both the heart and the hole are needed

4. Take the cardboard heart, pieces of paper, and pva glue and begin building up layers of paper over it as in Paper mache Christmas decorations

5. After a couple of layers, and while the glue/paper is still wet and soft, push the needle through the heart where it will hang from.

6. Let the glue dry, then add a final layer using the pieces that you put aside earlier.

7. Push the needle through the hole again

8. On the inside of the folded card, lightly draw a slightly larger heart around the heart shaped hole

9. Follow the instructions for Sew simple Christmas cards to stitch the outline

10. Thread wool through the hole in the heart decoration

11. Line the heart decoration up with the cut out heart, and make a hole in the back of the card so that heart can hang - tie the string loosely at the back so that it can be untied and hung on a tree later

12. Write your greeting on the front and you're done



Blue sky thinking, or head in the clouds?

Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS)  is often said to be cheaper, easier, faster, more reliable and even greener, so it’s right that every organisation explores these opportunities.

Put simply, cloud computing refers to a network of computer resources that are located just about anywhere and, for a price, part of this can be yours- short or long term.

The concept of SaaS running in the cloud has actually been around for a long time. With personal email such as Hotmail, being a well known example of SaaS that has been going since 1996, with 400 million accounts worldwide.

The approach can be compared to the potential flexibility of using public transport rather than committing to buying a car - you can choose a different mode of transport depending on your needs for the journey. A train could be faster, a bus could be cheaper and everyone sharing could potentially be more efficient and green.

 You also won’t have the initial outlay or be responsible for the maintenance, but with less responsibility comes less control.

Services might not run exactly when you’d like them to; they won’t get you right to the door; they could be less reliable; or in reality you might find yourself in a taxi (private cloud) every time, paying more for the luxury!

There are a lot of things to take into consideration, including remembering that just as owning a car doesn’t stop you from catching a train when it suits, the use of SaaS is not an all or nothing situation.

Despite clouds gathering on the horizon and talk of a government G-Cloud forecast to rain change on the public sector, it seems clear that we are likely to continue to host some applications in the foreseeable future, but that cloud computing is also genuine option for others.