Making this Christmas card based on a kaleidoscope has been great fun. It was made possible by the cheap availability of convincing mirror stickers that are sold for DIY decorative effects in bathrooms and kitchens. Perversely, the negative reviews about the problems of using them on walls made me want to use them for this project -- reviewers said they were very thin and lightweight, not at all mirror-like on rough surfaces, and that you would need to mount them on smooth card to obtain a good mirror effect!

My initial idea was to recreate a standard kaleidoscope in cardboard, complete with moving image on the end, that could somehow be folded flat in the envelope. After several attempts involving slashing the card and then holding it in one hand and sliding an image through the slot with the other, I abandoned that idea as being too fragile and fiddly.

Instead, I placed a sector of paper to restrict the opening -- initially to a particular angle, though later I used folding to allow some movement there. Having drawn some simple gnomes on the sector that reflected into a ring, Andy suggested placing a tree in the middle. I found that the best effect came not from sticking in a paper tree but from simply drawing on the mirrors.

Even a single mirror and good light can produce a convincing 3D effect.

But the second mirror makes the effect extremely compelling!