Today we stumbled across a strange but delightful blog that we felt compelled to tell you about. Joe, over at Toy-A-Day, promises to try and design, construct and post a new paper toy from a basic template each day for one year. So, the clever clogs among you will know that there’ll be 365 toys at the end of the 365th day! All the toys are free to download for those of you who want to make them. You can even design and construct your own if you’re feeling all creative by getting a copy of Joe’s blank template at the Toy-a-Day Facebook group.

The paper toys range from ridiculous to silly to a little bit scary (e.g. is it just us or does Yoda look like an angry gremlin?), but everyone one of the ShopCompare Shopaholics team admitted that yes, they’d even consider BUYING one or two whilst the more stringent among us agreed that it’d be a great FUNFRIDAY office activity to make some of our favourites by downloading Joe’s template.

Here some of our personal favourites, in no particular order!

Sally and Jack Skellington of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Created (in the movie!) by Doctor Finklestein, Halloween Town’s resident mad scientist. As Finklestein insists on keeping Sally under lock and key, protecting her from the outside world, but Sally becomes restless and eventually meets Jack Skellington. Don’t they make a lovely couple!

Batman and Robin – The Batman comic strip began a few years after the creation of the comic book Batman. At first titled Batman and Robin, a later incarnation was shortened to Batman. So now you know! We think these paper made caped crusaders are fantastic!

C-3PO – a protocol droid from the Star Wars universe designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent “in over six million forms of communication”. Smart cookie. You can also create his buddy R2-D2, not to mention Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who was hired by the (evil?) Empire and Jabba the Hutt to capture Han Solo and Chewbacca. Even though he is/was a “baddie”, he has legendary status in the ShopCompare office.

Smurf – The Smurfs are a group of small creatures who live in Smurf Village somewhere in the woods. Originally a series of comic strips first appearing in 1958, we remember them fondly from the popular 1980s animated kids tv series The Smurfs!

Edward Scissorhands, from the Tim Burton film featuring Johnny Depp as Edward who has shears and scissors for hands. We particularly love the hair!

A final and special mention to A Clockwork Orange, the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel and perhaps better remembered as the film by Stanley Kubrick. There is something somewhat unnerving about this paper toy. Keep a match handy in case things turn ugly…

All this and much more at http://toy-a-day.blogspot.com