As you may be aware, it’s been belt tightening season here at RNZ. We’ve all been asked for our thoughts on how to make the money go further (or at least have enough so we can stop “letting people go”), so when big PC asked for ideas about how we could save on the traditional Christmas spend up, I knew exactly what to suggest - we could make these little angels and glue them to cards instead of spending thousands of dollars on some sort of anonymous card that will only be thrown away as soon as it’s received.

Unfortunately that was another idea of mine that was given the thumbs down, although I thought it would have also doubled as a handy staff “development” session.

(EDIT: Thanks to Squidoo for the image - Wayne still hasn’t replaced my camera, (see below), now claims I pushed him in a rush for the garlic naan!)

Probably for the best though, the last time we had a staff bonding session we went to one of those decorate-your-own-plate/mug places. Jack Perkins got quite snippy when I pointed out that he needed to wait for one colour to dry before he tried to put on another, Lloyd was more interested in painting the Led Zep logo everywhere instead after he said the RNZ one was “too hard” and Bryan didn’t even finish his mug, claiming he was late for his shift selling Christmas trees at the Aro Valley Community Centre. A convenient excuse.

Anyway, this week’s activity is a little bit fiddly, but now that you’ve had a week of building pasta trains you should be well versed in how to work with this most versatile of materials.

Pasta Angels

What you’ll need:

• Elbow macaroni
• Bowtie pasta
• Rigatoni
• Gold pipe cleaners
• White and gold paint
• Medium round wooden balls
• Hot glue gun
• Paintbrush
• Glitter (optional)
• Vivid/felt pen

Instructions:

1. Paint the elbows and rigatoni white. Paint bowties gold or glittery silver. I usually paint them gold.

2. Cut each gold pipe cleaner into four equal parts. make loop and twist ends together, this should look like a halo. Stick twisted ends into the hole at the top of the ball, this should look like the halo over a head.

3. Glue the wings on the rigatoni. Glue two elbows to sides but letting them touch in the front of angel.

4. Put glue on upper mouth of rigatoni (the one closest to the wings) and attach the head.

5. Draw a face on the head.

There you go, an inexpensive way to liven up the studio/office/Christmas tree. You can make these look like your friends and family by adjusting the skin color, hair color, eye color etc. You can even write the name of the person on a piece of leather and glue to the lower part of the angel body. I like to call this one “Kim”.

EDIT: This image by Ani, thanks Ani.