Posts tagged ‘paper’

I’m teaching this free class at the Highland Square branch of the Akron-Summit County Public Library .

Iris Paper Folding Wall Art

Come use recycled paper and Iris Paper Folding techniques to make a 5″ x 7″ frame-able wall art. Iris Paper Folding is basically layering paper in a pattern and using it as a background behind a shape cutout. Participants are welcome to bring their own recycled papers such as envelopes, junk mail, greeting cards, or discarded books to use, but a selection of papers will also be available. If attendees have a paper trimmer, they are welcome to bring it, as cutting paper strips will be much quicker.

Sign up is required, and begins August 16, at 330-376-2927.

If you can’t make it to class, I also wrote a  tutorial for this project.

I made these beads from pages of an old poetry book.  My inspiration is from a similar project in Playing with Books-The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book.  The only difference was that they rolled up triangles & I rolled up rectangles, so my finished beads have more of a tube shape.  With either shape, the basic idea is to roll up a long strip of paper (leaving a hole for beading wire to go through), use adhesive to secure it closed (I used decoupage glue), cover the outside of the bead with glue (for a protective finish), & let it dry.

I’m in a friend’s wedding next month and volunteered to make the bachelorette invites.  I needed something quick and simple which is hard because I prefer to go overboard & make things too intricate!

For these, I stamped the “Love is in the air” quote, free-hand cut out the flower & edged it with ink, and used a straight-edge & marker to draw faux stitches around the patterned paper.

By the way, the bachelorette party is at The Winery at Wolf Creek (near Akron, Ohio).  If you’ve never been there, I completely recommend it for a unique date night.  They only sell wine , chocolate, & cheese/cracker baskets, so you’re welcome to bring your own picnic foods.  The view is great with the vineyard & lake in the distance.  Plus they have musicians on some evenings and offer fun events like “cooking with wine” and “chocolate & wine pairings”.

Easter is sneeking up on me this year. I haven’t really done any seasonal crafts and I have been feeling like I better get my act in gear. So today I spent the day working on Easter crafts, including Elise’s dress, which may or may not be done in time.

But I did succeed in making paper mache eggs with the kids. We wadded up a paper bag into an egg shape and then used watered down glue to paper mache wrapping tissue paper to the outside. For some stripes we wrapped the eggs in embroidery thread. I think that if we make more I will use paper strips instead as the thread looks too different and doesn’t have the same effect as a dyed easter egg.

Why didn’t I just dye eggs? Well, I only had two eggs and I didn’t want to hard boil them!

Last year at Zero Landfill I grabbed a ton of stuff. I’ve used at least half of it, but there are a good deal of items which have just been stuffed into the stash box.

This year I took a different strategy to the event. I only grabbed stuff that I ran out of last time. So I picked up 4 wallpaper sample books and some loose fabric swatches. They weighed my grub on my way out. It was a whopping 38 pounds!

These books are going to be free for your use in decorating a journal if you show up on Thursday to my class. Otherwise I will be cutting them up for all sorts of crafts, as will my scissor-happy girls!

I have lots of cardboard record cases left over from the record bowls I made for Christmas gifts.  Some of the pictures on the cases are really fun, so I needed a way to reuse them.  I decided to make them into file folders. Read more »

Come Saturday to Craft Akron’s Holiday Open House for free make & takes and some handmade gift shopping.  I’m teaching these tags for one of the free crafts.

The background papers are just small leftover papers from larger projects, and the flower & tree are made from pages of an old song book.  The “Happy Birthday” & “Merry Christmas” are stamped.

Each year I have plans to make an Advent Calendar with my kids, but it never happens. But when I checked my email this week I found an advent themed edition of Kids Craft Weekly and I found new inspiration to make it happen. There are some really cute projects that use recycled paper items, like toilet paper tubes. But the one that I like the most is the origami paper advent box which from Loobylu.

This might be just the right sized project for me to complete this weekend. Just in time for the first Sunday in Advent.

For my grandpa’s birthday I whipped up a quickie card made mostly from recycled paper in this old song book.

I stamped “happy birthday” and used a circle punch to cut it out and a smaller circle punch with the treble clefs.  I glued these to a gray paper background to make a border.  The hat is folded from scrapbook paper…it’s just a mini version of the hats typically made from newspaper.  The background is a page from the song book.

I first discovered Iris Folding through a library book.   It took a long time to understand the instructions, but I figured it out and made tons of Christmas Tree cards that year!  Iris Folding has a learning curve, and after that, each project still takes awhile.  For that reason I make fewer greeting cards and more frame-worthy projects.  Plus, after learning the traditional methods I decided to be less rigid with my style.  I prefer more random color patterns & less calculated placements of each paper, and I don’t care for the “Iris” shape in the center.  Plus, for this project I’m using paint chip samples, which if I folded them, they’d be way too thick!  So, this project is inspired by Iris Folding, but if you’d like to see the original methods, I recommend the book 460 Iris Folded Cards to Make: The Complete Iris Folded Compendium.  And for more images & inspiration, check out the Flickr Iris Folding Handmade Cards Group.

Here are instructions to make this tree, along with a free original pattern.

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