Origami Portrait - progress

Well, it has, once again, been far too long since my last post. But exams are over and I'm beginning to regain ownership over my brain so I just wanted to share my progress on my origami portrait. You can find the original post with the method to my madness here.

It's starting to look quite impressive I think, and I've recently realised how huge it's going to be, which is daunting but exciting. Wish me luck, a few thousand more boxes to go

Origami Portrait - beginning

Hello,
It's been a while. We've just moved into a lovely old house so close to the zoo I can hear the lions roaring at night, so although it's a nice place to be, it's been a bit hectic lately. I've also had much trouble setting up the internet here, but no matter, because I have been on uni holidays, and the break from the distractions of the internet has allowed me to make a good beginning on my new project. The idea came to me at uni one day when I was waiting for a lecture to start. I'd found this tutorial a while ago when I was making christmas crafts and I began thinking that I could make boxes from squares of old magazines and turn them into a portrait. It wasn't until a good few days into this project that I realised how big the task is. But I'm hoping the payoff will be equally large.

So I started off by gridding up the picture I want to recreate, and deciding what shades and colours I would use. I decided on three shades of skins colour (so I wouldn't be completely overwhelmed trying to find exact shades in the magazines), hair colour, black and white, and a background colour - blue. Here is the grid.

I copied it into a maths book to help define the shades I would use, and expand the picture, to make sure the final product would show the detail of the glasses.

Next I had to go through a heap of magazines to find pages with the right colours/shades.

These were cut so that I would get lots of squares of the appropriate colours. I started by drawing up the grids on the magazines and cutting it with scissors, but soon found, a craft knife a lot faster, and use the width of the ruler as the length of the sides of my squares, so there's no need for measuring and ruling, I just lay the edge of the ruler against the edge of the magazine and cut down the other side of the ruler with the craft knife.

So now I had to fold the boxes. Here's that link to the tutorial again.

Cute, aren't they? They're about 1cm wide, and 5mm high.

So then I have to separate them out into the three shades of skin colour:

and all the other colours:

And finally I have begun to glue them together, following my pattern. If you look with the right kind of eyes, you can tell that the part I've completed is his left eye and some of his glasses.

Hope to bring the finished project to you soon! (but not too soon, because I have another few thousand boxes to make - wish me luck)

See my progress here

Paper Cherry Blossoms

 This is another craft that requires a bunch of patience but I think it really paid off. I think cherry blossoms are just so beautiful and have that sort of oriental zen factor that gives them simplicity even though they're so detailed and dainty.

Click here to see the tutorial I used to make the flowers. I used plain printing paper that I swirled pink watercolour paint onto, this way none of my blossoms are quite the same as one another.

Before I began this craft I had found this square black vase for cheap and it gave me the inspiration to put something contrasting into it, I decided on the pretty intricacy of cherry blossoms. I was lucky in finding some branches I thought were perfect that were dead on a tree in my backyard. I tied them together (with yarn, my handy tool that I use for everything) so they sat just how I wanted them to and slid them into the vase. I stuffed around them with newspaper to hide my very messy blue yarn tying.

With them arranged I glued my flowers on, with some general craft glue. I guess you can arrange the flowers on the branches however cherry blossom look in your head, but I had an idea that they look great grouped together and towards the ends of the branches.

The finished product. I feel a little bit proud each time I walk past it.

Christmas Crafts

Christmas is now nearly a month gone, but maybe because I only just took my tree down it feels like not long ago.

Anywho, before Christmas I became obsessed with Christmas crafts and determined that all the ornaments on my tree would be hand made by me.
I'd like to share a few.

1. Origami Snowflakes

These snowflakes are the type of origami a person can feel proud to have made. I found the pattern here. It helps if you've had a little experience with origami, but you should be fine. I used plain printing paper for the white snowflake and silver wrapping paper for the silver one. I've also seen it done with a slightly transparent paper which looked great.

2. Paper Rose Ball Ornaments

I don't recall the exact site I found the instructions for the paper roses, but they're all over the internet. Here is one. I made mine from magazine pages so the ornament was pretty as well as environmentally friendly. It took me a little while to get the hang of the rolling, I guess everyone has their own technique. I then just glued them into a ball, including a piece of thread doubled over between two of the roses so the ornament could be hung. Each ball takes a fair few roses to complete, but once I got into the "craft zone" (my special crafting mind-space) it seemed to run smoothly.

3. Paper Flower Ball Ornaments

These paper flower balls are really sturdy and I think they're really impressive, but they're also very time consuming. Each petal must be made separately, then glued together, then the flowers glued together (again with a thread glued in for hanging purposes). Here is a link to instructions, they put some extra beads on theirs, but I prefer to leave them entirely paper : click here.

4. Rolled Paper Christmas Tree

I hadn't intended to make this ornament (I only made one), but I had all these left over strips of paper from cutting out the squares for the Paper Flower Ball petals, so I did make it. This one requires extra patience and dexterity, but it's simple. Simply roll your strip around some thread and then around itself, lowering it as you go so it is always approximately 1mm below where it had passed the last round. Glue as you go. When the strip runs out, replace it with a new strip. I used a different coloured strip each time, but I can imagine it could look lovely as one colour as well. Stop when it's big enough or you're fed up :) 

5. Mini Boxes

I made these boxes very small (about 10mm wide and 5mm high) but I'm sure if you have a larger Christmas tree it could handle having larger boxes. The larger the boxes, the less fiddly they will be to make. Here is the box tutorial. Make one slightly smaller than the other and glue the thread into the larger box, then slide in the smaller. Glue the smaller box in if the fit is not tight.

Hope that gets you inspired. Maybe you could start making some Christmas crafts now and by the end of the year you'll have a full arsenal. Actually, that sounds like a good plan...