Pachyderm paratroopers!

How is that? So what do you do with unwelcome guests? My advice is, don’t be polite...put them to good use…make them work hard! What I’m suggesting is collect all the flimsy plastic packets that you spot over a period of a week. You’ll be surprised at how many you’ll find.

Test fly one parachute.
1. Flatten a packet and cut off about ¼ its length on the handle side.
2.As shown, stick tape at regular distances along the newly cut edge, at about 6-8 spots.
3.Using a pointed pair of scissors, gently poke holes through the tape, just big enough to pass thread through.
4.When you have 6-8 equal lengths of thread (about the length of the plastic packet) tie all the strands into one knot.
5.Tape this ‘parachute’ onto the back of a small cut-out character. In this case, an elephant. If you really want to be posh, stick a mirror image of the elephant on the other side, so the knot is not visible.
6.Now, from the top of the stairs, toss your ‘elephant-on-a-parachute’ high above you and watch it catch the wind and glide gently down to the ground.
7.Considering this is the monsoon, and we’re enjoying gusty winds through out the day, here’s another thing you could do — convert your parachute into a kind of kite. Tape on a long (5 foot) twine to your elephant, and just as you would with a kite, toss it into the air and run against the wind, unravelling more twine from your hand only if the wind ‘catches the sails’ and your parachute flies.

Try your hand with other cartoon characters instead of the elephant. And the more of you that get together to make parachutes or ‘kites’ together, the better the spectacle will be, when a ‘battalion of elephant paratroopers’ are dropped from the top of the stairs, or from a balcony.