Soon all the bears were busy with their coloured pencils and felt pens, drawing beautifully illustrated numbers on each strip of paper. They were very different from each other, but all beautiful.
"Now what we do," continued Edward, "is on the first day of December, we take the paper strip numbered 1 and make it into a loop - see, the paper is gummed at one end so it is easier to stick. Because of the way the loops twist and turn, there needs to be a blank loop between each numbered loop, otherwise we won't see all the numbers at the end. So every day in December each bear will loop a blank strip through the previous numbered one, then take the next relevantly-numbered strip of paper, and loop that through the blank one. It sounds a bit complicated but I'll just do a few test ones for you to see exactly what I mean."
