Snowflake Postcard

As winter still is in full bloom (or rather in full snow) I have done another snow project. This one is a bit tricky and requires a lot of patience.

Snowflake Postcard How To:

Material: 1 Sheet of white paper
                a small piece of sandwich paper (left over from the snow crystal project)
                a small piece of a different transparent paper (a different shade of white,
                a slightly different texture)
                sky bluish paper
                sewing thread in different shades of blue (consistent to your choice of
                background paper)
                glue stick

• Cut the sheet of paper in two crosswise.
• Draw the contour of a snowflake and cut out.
• Cut out a snowflake from the transparent paper.
• Cut out a small hexagonal crystal shape for the center and 6 pieces for the tips of the snowflake from the sandwich paper.
• Align them all on your background paper in layers, so that they fit into the snowflake cut-out of the cover.
• Glue carefully only in the center of each 'arm' of the snow crystal, so that it is just fixed a bit, but the ends will remain loose.
• Sew the layers together, using different shades of sewing thread for each seam.
• Glue under the cover and sew carefully together.
• Glue the finished  cover and the other half of the A4 sheet together. Cut off protruding edges if necessary.
• Fold in two.
• Very carefully pull the loose ends of the tranparent parts of the crystal a bit off  the background for a more 3D look.

Fixing the transparent paper onto the background and sewing everything together are the trickiest parts. If your sewing machine allows for extra slow sewing, take the chance.

Snow crystals

Finally it's winter outside! Everything is beautifully covered in snow, so that I felt like making some snow crystals inside, too. Unfortunately my camera is absolutely inadequate for close-ups. But I will give you better photographs as soon as I have my new one. Anyway, I hope you get a nice enough impression to feel like doing them yourself.

Snow Crystal Tutorial

Material: 1 sheet of paper
                sandwich paper
                glue stick
                darning wool
                darning needle

• Cut out circles of different sizes, varying the sizes of the inner circles, too. Don't throw away the cutouts: they will be used for the non-transparent crystals. It has to be an even number of circles as you will glue them together in pairs.
• Rumple a sheet of sandwich paper and carefully smoothe it a bit. Glue a piece to one circle and fix it thoroughly, then glue the second circle on top.
• The full circles are also glued together in pairs of two to lend them more stability.
• With the darning needle pierce a pattern of tiny holes into the circle that can be divided by six, as in real snow crystals.
• Take a length of darning wool (not two short, as there is no way to hide loose ends of a further thread) and pull through the first hole at the outside of your pattern. Leave about 10 - 15 cm dangling, you will need it later to build a hanger.
• Now you can stitch any pattern you like.There's an amazing range of possiblities without any need for repetition. The only thing that you have to keep in mind is that you end in the same hole where you started, but threading through the opposite side.  I also took care to have them look identical on both sides, which indeed helps with inventing patterns, because otherwise an even number of holes might leave you with your thread ending at random.
• Knot the loose ends of your thread together building a hanger.

Tea Light Lamp

Today it is so dark, you can leave the lights on all day long. So I decided to spice up my tea lights by making these lamps.

It's a bit time-consuming to do them because between the different steps you have to allow for the several layers to dry. As there is wax involved it is not advisable to use a blow-dryer to shorten the process.

How to:

Material: 1 sheet of paper
                tea light holder from the Swedish furniture store (the blue and yellow one ;))
                watercolours or acrylic paint
                a white candle
                paper knife

• Measure the circumference of your tea light holder and add 1cm for comfort plus 1 cm per side to overlap.
• Fix the paper to your work surface with masking tape and rub it thoroughly with your candle.
• Apply a coat of watercolour and let dry.
• Fix the colour with diluted glue, taking care not to smear the watercolours. Or use acrylic paint so you can leave out his step. Let dry.
• After drying, cut in appropriate strips. Prepare two templates of a fir tree in different sizes and cut the contours into the paper strips. Take care only to cut one half of it lengthwise.
• Carefully fold back the trees along the edge of a ruler so there will be small wholes to let the light shine through. Now the tree halves add up to a hole tree.
• Fold the short sides 1 cm from the edge.
• To close the circle cut one tree exactly in the middle with its center in line with the fold. Also cut a bit from the tree top down- and from its base upwards, leaving about a third of the length uncut.
• On the opposite fold cut a rectangle about 2 mm longer than this uncut piece and 1 to 2 mm wide.
• Turn down the 'flaps' of the tree and pull gently through the rectangular slit. Unfold the tree.

When making these lights, it occurred to me that they resemble the bark of birch trees. So I made another set, where the colours are even closer to the original, glued some spring green tissue paper on the inside and cut birch leaves instead of fir trees.

These go even better with the spring like temperatures outside. Plus they will make you forget about the darkness and the soggy wheather.

Snowballs

 

As winter seams to want to disguise as a very rainy spring, with temperatures so high that snow is no option in the near future, I decided to make some snowballs and hang them on branches.

This is a job for people who love making a bit of a mess and are not afraid of sticky fingers.


How to do them:

Material: 1 sheet of white paper
                plastic balls as you find them in your roll-on
                Planatol A or white PVA glue
                pieces of string, 25 cm long ( I used some Lurex)

• Shred the paper in a paper shredder that does cross-cuts.
• Dilute the glue with water to the consistency of condensed milk.
• Spread a little bit of glue onto the plastic ball.
• Fold the thread in half and glue first. Fix it by glueing a few paper cuts crosswise over the first centimeter.
• Cover the whole ball with paper cuts, making sure to thoroughly spread the glue so that the cuts stick properly (This is the messy part!).
• Continue until the ball is covered completely. It does not matter if there are small gaps left as you can see on the photo.

This single sheet of paper sufficed to do 7 balls.

Bugle Beads

This is project no 2: bugle beads.

They are so easy to do and so much fun. Of course they all came out of one single sheet of paper. There was even one more bead, but I prefer an uneven number, so I left it aside. I intend to a do a lot more of them, in different shapes and sizes, too. And of course in a variety of patterns and colours, so they will fit different styles and clothes.

So here is the how to:

Material: 1 sheet of paper (as described in the intro)
                Planatol or white PVA glue
                eye pins of different lengths
                fine-liner
                black rubber cord
                fastening
                pliers

• Cut the paper in strips of 2, 3 an 4 cm width. A length of 15 cm will do or the beads will become to bulky.
• Apply some glue to the beginning of a strip.
• Choose an eye pin 0.5 mm longer than the bead shall be and wrap the paperstrip closely around about 2 or 3 times.
• Now bend the surplus of the eye pin closely around the paper and tweeze tight.
• Put glue on the rest of the strip and carefully roll it up. Pay special attention to the end because you do not want it to come loose.
• Wait for the bead to dry and then adorn it with a pattern of your liking.
• Paint 2 - 3 times with glue to make sure the bead is water resistant and the pattern will not rub off on your clothes.
• Thread all beads on a length of rubber cord and add a fastening of your choice.

Of course you can vary the paper, the pattern, the colours, whether you want to take rubber band or maybe stainless steel, just as you like it.

Several years ago I made a similar but much larger chain out of newspaper cuttings. You can see it here:

 If you look closely, you can see that I added a few beads of different papers. Zebra striped e. g. or silver or gold and even black as highlights.

Pyramids

Here comes my first project: pyramids. I remember them from my childhood, when we drank Sunkist juice with straws out of them. Also in Britain you can buy PG Tips tea in such cute tea bags. I was always wondering, how one could do these intricate containers. When I discovered how simple they are to create, I was all the more fascinated with them.

Here's the how to:

• Cut a rectangle with one side twice as long as the other.
• Then fold in half and glue or sew them together (as in the above project) along the adjoining sides.
• Leave open the last side.
• Open and fold exactly in the opposite way so that the seam meets the middle of the leftover side.
• Then glue or sew together.
• Pull a bit until it shapes like a pyramid.

While doing them I discovered that it is much easier to fold the creases and properly shape the pyramids, if you thoroughly rumple the paper and smoothe it out before sewing it. The paper is much easier to handle then. Of course you must not overdo this or it might tear.