Many board games last for years, of course, but eventually their useful life will come to an end, either due to families growing up, pieces getting lost or simply new editions becoming available. By recycling the boards, Ellie Ellie has created a beautiful new line of sketchbooks and given tired old games the opportunity to provide fun and entertainment all over again.

Paying homage to the classics, the sketchbooks are bound in covers made from original boards of games like Monopoly, Cluedo and Scrabble. Each handmade sketchbook is priced around £19.50 and contains about 50 heavyweight pages of 100% recycled paper.

Also new will be a Petite Harumika range, building on the success of the original Harumika line.

This mini version will feature a 7cm dress form attached to a key chain. Young fashionistas will be able to attach the provided material, accents and gems to make eye-catching designs to attach to bags and clothes, or to be used as pencil toppers.

The Petite Harumika range will include three themes – Party, Romantic and Celebrity.

All the usual players are included, from the tiger leaping through a ring of fire to the bear on a bicycle and ringmaster cracking his whip. There’s also a balancing elephant, two giraffes and a tightrope walker, which can be positioned any way you like among the other character and scenery pieces, including the all-important big top.

Unlike some room decorations, these ones wont stimulate your children too much at bedtime as they are softly drawn and coloured in gentle pastel shades. Each piece is made from adhesive fabric and should last through room and house moves as they can be placed on almost any type of surface and then removed and reused.

All the fun of the Faraway Circus stickers will cost you around £70.

Each card even includes a fold-out board game, complete with dice.

Available in a large selection of themes, including Jungle (pictured), Wild West, Pets, Dinosaurs, Fairies and Doctor Who, Cardooo cards are priced around £2.99 each, with everything fitting inside a regular 5 x 7in. envelope (provided).

What’s more, a normal letter stamp will be enough to wing your Cardooo card/present on its way to the lucky recipient.

Han Solo generally gets by with an impatient thump on an instrument panel, but the new Haynes Manual offers much more in-depth advice.

Written by Star Wars expert Ryder Windham, the Star Wars: Millennium Falcon Owner’s Workshop Manual offers exhaustive information on the Modified YT-1300 Corellian Freighter (as the Falcon is known to aficionados).

Crammed with full-colour artwork and the trademark Haynes cutaway diagrams, the book guides you through the (illegally) enhanced engines and (illegal) military-grade weaponry, right down to the (illegal) compartments for storing contraband.

Including fascinating information from the original Corellian Engineering Corporation Buyer’s Guide, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.

The Millennium Falcon Owners’ Workshop Manual is priced around £14.99 from the Haynes website.

Each pack is priced around £2.99 and contains three different colours of clay to make the body of the monster and two laminated card pieces to make detailed bits such as features, arms and feet.

There are 48 different packs to collect and each one also comes with a small leaflet explaining how to build your monster and also serving as an adoption certificate for your little creature. Velcro is included in each pack too, to help connect the card bits to the clay bits.

If you’re very lucky, one in 24 packs will turn out to be a ‘Super Special Packet’ containing a ‘Design your own Moshi & Be Creative’ set. These ones come with various colours of clay and a selection of noses, eyes, arms and feet to enable you to make a random creation.

The Moshi Monsters Clay Buddies Deluxe Pack is the same sort of thing, except even better, with twice as much content as a regular size pack. Priced around £5.99, the packs contain two character cards showing your Moshi in different colours, one character card explaining how to turn your Moshi into a Super Moshi, one accessories card sheet, six different colours of clay and an adoption booklet with integral display. There are six of these to collect.

The My Clay Buddies website is being launched at the same time, allowing children to upload images of their Moshi for a chance of winning prizes, and they can also upload their unique Moshi designs in the hope of making their Moshi into a permanent character.

Children can not only enjoy the look of having a Color-in or Hip Hop Tattoo, they can also take part in the process of colouring and placing tattoos on themselves and their friends.

The unisex packs provide over 100 different designs to colour in using the six included markers. When finished, the colourful piece of skin art can be placed in the chosen location on the body.

Priced around £9.99 per pack, the Color-in set includes a lighthearted selection of designs including butterflies and hearts, while the Hip Hop set has an edgier ‘street’ feel about it, with darker imagery of skeletons, dragons and the like.

Easy to apply, in minutes children can emulate any of the 20 million adults in the world who sport a tattoo, including favourite celebrities such as Cheryl Cole, Tulisa and David Beckham.

In the meantime, you can enjoy a little Lion King fun with these activity sheets – just the thing to keep the little ones occupied during the half-term break.

Timon and Pumbaa colour-in sheet
The Lion King Activity Games

The strong wooden bookends feature the loveable brown monster at one end and the little mouse that he’s determined to devour at the other. Beautifully painted in an exact replica of Axel Scheffler’s illustrated characters, the bookends also feature a line of the famous book on each, and they are priced around £24.99.

Also new from Rainbow Designs is The Gruffalo Paint & Play Set, which features the Gruffalo and the mouse, as well as the other characters who fancied snacking on the little mouse: the fox, snake and owl.

Whether these characters are as beautifully painted as the bookends or not is up to you – the set comes with paint, paintbrushes and instructions for how to decorate these stackable dolls. The set is priced around £14.99.

Despite the Gruffalo’s intentions to eat the little mouse, and the fearsome descriptions of his ‘terrible tusks’ and so on in the book, the Gruffalo still comes across as a bit of a cuddly character. Using the Make and Play Gruffalo Kit (priced around £8.99), you can create your own one to cuddle up to.

Full instructions in the kit direct you on how to use the materials provided to sew, stuff and stick things together to create him.

By Nature’s intriguing new product allows you to collect waste paper from around the house, turn it into mush and then set it into pieces of track. Priced around £24.99, the train set comes with an electric train, so that when you have constructed your layout you can watch it in action.

The train is joined by three carriages and operated by batteries and, along with the Recycle Factory, is suitable for children aged six and over.

The Recycle Factory consists of a mixing bowl, draining tray, three shape moulds and instructions. As well as aiming to offer fun and creativity, the set also doubles as an educational experience to help children understand the process of recycling.