This post was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

Hitachi Japan have created some endangered species animal paper models. I thought I’d try their sea turtle model so I could give you a quick review.

The colours printed less vibrantly than shown on the website, although I accidentally printed it onto cheap paper using my printer’s economy settings, so that’s probably why! The model only has 2 pieces (head and body) and printed onto 1 sheet of paper. Although the key is written in Japanese, you really don’t need instructions (and see my previous tutorial on this type of paper model if you need more assistance). Cut around the solid lines, fold the dotted lines, glue the tabs – it was very straightforward and I’m impressed with the result of such a simple design:

So cute!

If you like animals, don’t forget to check out the other models in the series too.

Here’s a seasonal twist on my origami lucky wishing stars tutorial! Make a pile of stars using strips cut from festive coloured papers (try using offcuts of Christmas gift wrap, or recycle pages from holiday magazines), then string the stars into a garland to decorate your tree.

To make the garland pictured above, I used gold scrapbook paper to make the stars, nylon bead thread to string them onto, and seed beads as spacers. Total cost: under 50c per metre of garland – and it would be even cheaper if you used recycled paper for the stars!

This post was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

Tea bag folding is a paper craft that originated in Holland, where many tea bags come wrapped individually in paper packets. By cutting each bag down to a square, the bags can be folded and then combined into a geometric shape, just like in 2D modular origami. But don’t let the name ‘tea bag folding’ put you off – you can perform this craft with any small squares of coloured paper. The resulting medallions can be used to decorate handmade greeting cards, embellish your wrapped gifts, or you could try adding a hanging loop (glue the units together first!) to make an unusual Christmas decoration.

In this tutorial, to give you an idea of the techniques, I’ll demonstrate a simple fold pattern and its assembly into a medallion. I’ll also show you an interesting variant on the basic fold, and two ways to combine the variant units to make different medallions.

Introduction

To give a more authentic result, your paper squares should be patterned, and each square should have the same pattern. There are many online resources that provide printable sheets of repeating patterns to cut into squares, and fold diagrams to produce different shapes; Google ‘tea bag folding’ to find more links.

Instructions

You will need 8 squares of paper per medallion. If you’re printing your tea bag papers, cut them into squares, otherwise assemble 8 squares of origami paper. You can use squares of any size; here I’ve used 1.5″ (3.8cm) squares:

Note: As with all origami, this works best if you strongly crease each fold. You can do this with a bone folder, or just by running your thumbnail along the crease of each fold before moving on to the next step.

Basic Unit

Glossary:

• A mountain fold is made by folding the edges away from you (creating a mountain shape).
• A valley fold is made by folding the edges towards you (creating a valley shape).

For each square, place it patterned side up (below, left). Mountain fold in half diagonally (below, right):

Open up and mountain fold along the other diagonal (below, left). Now valley fold the square in half (below, right):

Open up again and, by pushing the edges of paper towards each other at the points marked by the arrows below, you’ll start to fold the square down into a triangle along the creases you’ve just made.

The basic fold is now complete (below, left). Take 2 of your triangles and slot them together so the points are interleaved (below, right):

Continue to add triangles to assemble the shape. They won’t stay together unless you glue them down; you can glue them as you go, or assemble them very carefully and then glue them all together at the end.

Here’s the completed basic medallion:

Variant

For a more interesting variant, when you’ve completed the basic unit, mountain fold each of the two front points of the triangle up to meet the top point. This will leave you with the triangle shape with a diamond shape on top. Interleave the units as before:

By varying the order of assembly, you can create different patterns. In the photo below, the medallion on the left is formed by interleaving one unit above, one unit below, around the circle. The medallion on the right is formed so each unit is half over and half under the neighbouring units:

It’s as simple as that!

You may have noticed the black papercut trees I made for the background of my Halloween design photos. I was wondering if I could reuse them somehow to create a new tutorial for Folding Trees, and I came up with the idea of using a candle to create a large shadow silhouette of the tree on a wall. The trees I had cut before weren’t suitable as I had cut them as background pieces at the edge of the scene (so there was only half a tree in each case!), so I drew and cut a new complete tree from black cardstock for this project:

And here it is by the flickering light of a candle:

What a transformation! I’m so happy with how it turned out! My papercutting attempts are getting better each time I try it, and I’m finding it easier to do simple freehand drawing without a reference photo too.

Oh, and if you’d like to see the finished tutorial, you can now find it below!

This tutorial was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

Use the magical effect of candlelight to turn a papercut template:

…into a striking shadow decoration:

In the following tutorial I’ll show you how to make a stylish decoration like the one I made above, using only cardstock and a simple tealight candle…

I drew my tree freehand onto black cardstock. To draw a tree, you need to remember two basic things:

1. Tree branches are thicker at their bases
2. Side branches are usually offset from each other

Firstly, draw the trunk and a few main branches, then add thinner branches coming off the main branches. Keep adding branches and twigs until you like the overall shape and effect.

Easy option: If you’re not comfortable with drawing, you could use a stencil to trace a shape onto the cardstock, or print a shape directly onto your cardstock (the card doesn’t have to be black; it just has to be thick enough to cast a good shadow). I think the branches of my tree make for a very effective shadow shape, but you could keep it really simple: cut out the silhouette of a cat or a pumpkin and just cut holes for the eyes (and mouth for the pumpkin) to give you some easy Halloween decorations.

Remember to give your shape a wide base (grass/bushes in this example, but it could be a plain horizontal band) to help it to stand up securely. Carefully cut out your shape with a sharp knife, being careful not to chop off any of the details!

Papercutting tip: In the close up photo below, you can see how I cut out the overall shape (the rounded shape of the bush) before cutting the fine detail (the leaves). From this stage, it’s easy to cut out each small triangular shape. I find this method much easier and faster than trying to cut the whole outline in one step.

Make a stand for your template by cutting a modified L-shape or a right-angled triangle from some card. Make sure it is tall and wide enough to support your shape. I used a leftover corner of my piece of card to make this simple stand shape:

Position the stand so the bottom is level with the base of your design, and the vertical edge is in the middle of the design. If you still have visible pencil marks on your design, make sure that side is face up for this stage, so the pencil marks will be on the back of the finished decoration! Tape one side to the back of the template:

Flip the stand over, and tape the other side to the template.

Now when you stand the shape up, the stand should stick out behind it and keep it upright.

Here is the finished papercut tree:

Now stand your template up on a table close to a wall, but not touching it. Place a tealight in front of it, dim the lights, and watch out for the shadow on the wall! You can alter the size and definition of the shadow by moving the candle and/or the template towards or away from the wall.

CAUTION: Candle flames and paper are not safe playmates! Never leave a burning candle unattended, and make sure your paper template is secure and will not fall or bend forwards towards the candle flame. For maximum safety, use an LED tealight (although you may find that it is not bright enough to cast a strong shadow).

Today I have a new tutorial up at Folding Trees showing how to weave paper strips into a coloured checkerboard pattern. The greetings cards and bookmark I made (above) use strips cut from old magazine pages!

I’ve just reviewed this pattern for Folding Trees, and here’s the hummingbird card I made. Isn’t it gorgeous? And it looks a lot more complicated to make than it really is!

Click through to Folding Trees this week to read my review of the pattern and to enter our contest to win a pattern of your choice from Easy Cut Pop-up, the people who designed the amazing hummingbird above and many more wonderful pop-up card designs!

You can now see my review of the Easy Cut Pop-up pattern, below.

PS – Thank you to everyone for the Discworld love! Many of you have asked, so I’m in the process of writing another post about it, to give you a bit of insight into how I designed the Disc to make the landmasses – watch this space…

Review: Easy Cut Pop-up Cards

This review was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

Kirigami is a Japanese art similar to origami, but with kirigami you cut the paper as well as folding it, making it easier to create more complex shapes. Easy Cut Pop-up specialize in unique pop-up cards patterns with beautiful kirigami designs, such as the above koala and joey card. All their designs look wonderful, but are they really easy to make? I was given the opportunity to try one of their patterns, so I can now answer that question for you with this review!

I downloaded my pattern, the Hummingbird pattern, as a pdf file. The file includes the pattern pages and pages with pictorial instructions. The website also includes links to YouTube videos of each model being assembled – what a great idea! I would recommend you watch the video all the way through before you start your model, to get some familiarity with the process.

To begin, you need 3 or 4 sheets of letter-sized cardstock (you could probably also use heavyweight paper).

June’s Tip: at my local craft store, the only letter-sized cardstock I could find came in packs of 50 or 100 sheets, and the colours weren’t great either. Try checking out the scrapbooking section, which has individual sheets of paper and cardstock, in a much wider range of colours, patterns and textures. I bought 3 sheets of 12″x12″ scrapbook paper and trimmed them down to 8.5″x11″. Much cheaper, and I got to pick the colours I really wanted!

Print the pattern pages directly onto your cardstock. Score the sheets along all the dashed lines, then fold each sheet in half along the marked fold. Cut along all the solid lines with scissors, cutting through both thicknesses of cardstock. The scoring took only seconds to complete. The cutting took a little longer, because it pays to cut accurately along the lines. The advantage of these designs is that, as each piece is symmetrical, you cut both sides at once, saving on half the cutting!

June’s Tip: make sure you have some comfortable, sharp scissors to cut the cardstock with. My scissors weren’t comfortable to begin with, and my hand was hurting by the end. In any of your crafting, if your hand does start to hurt, TAKE A BREAK.  

Now for the fine folding and assembly. Fold all the pieces along each fold line. This was the only step I had a slight problem with – I couldn’t figure out whether to make one fold forwards or backwards. It was easily solved though – I just revisited the YouTube video, skipped through to the part I was stuck on, and found the answer within a few seconds. Assembly was very simple – the pieces are cleverly designed to slot together easily.

And wow… the result is amazing! It really was quick and easy to make. This is my finished hummingbird card:

I have never made a pop-up card or done kirigami before, and this pattern made the process really simple. I highly recommend Easy Cut Pop-Up card patterns if you want to make spectacular, unique cards for your friends and family (there is even an option to print your own message on the front of the card!), or display the finished cards as beautiful artwork.

This week on Folding Trees, I am running a daily series on different types of paper flowers. To get things started, I followed a few online tutorials to make tissue paper flowers, but the end results looked really childish – not the elegant decorative look I like. So I had a think and came up with my own method to make these tissue paper carnations.

I think they look lovely – the darker petal edges add a lot of realism and give the flowers a more professional finish. My inspiration was some beautiful carnations I was given last winter (thank you, library friends!):

And here is a close-up of my paper version – pretty similar, don’t you think?

If you’d like to see how to make your own, check out my tutorial on Folding Trees!

This weekend, I made these paper models. They are made from PDF files that you print, cut, fold and glue together. The models are very well designed; cutting out all the parts is time-consuming, but it’s amazing that you can make something so realistic from a couple of sheets of paper!

You can now see my tutorial below with tips on how to cut and assemble models like these – as the instructions are all written in Japanese it helps to know them before you get started!

Tutorial: Cut & Fold Paper Models

This tutorial was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

If you look around on the internet, there are a multitude of printable cut-out-and-fold paper models available to download. They look amazing, but how easy are they to actually put together? How accurate do you have to be for them to look good? And, as a lot of them have instructions in Japanese, how easy is it to follow the instructions without understanding the text? In this tutorial, I’ll give you some hints and tips to make the process a bit easier!

My sample paper models are the Cape Penguin and Japanese Leaf Turtle models from the Konica Minolta Environmental Papercraft site. I like these models because they only use 2 sheets of paper each, and the animals are realistically designed. (For reference, the penguin is 6″ tall, and the turtle is 6″ long.) Check the end of this post for other paper model resources.

Printing the patterns

The instructions on my models say to use paper of between 0.20 and 0.24mm thickness (that’s about twice the thickness of regular copy paper). I think thin cardstock would be the best choice, if you have it available, but I used the thickest copy paper I could find (marked 28lb) and it was fine. Also, please note that these Japanese PDF files are designed to print on A4 size paper. North Americans with letter-size paper: remember to set the PDF Page Scaling to Shrink to Printable Area. If you forget this, the top and bottom of each page will be missing from your printouts. Not that I would ever make a mistake like that (ahem).

Understanding the line markings

Before you start cutting, you should make sure you understand where to cut! Below, I have annotated the legend for the cutting lines on the patterns I used – the line markings may vary on different diagrams, but the Japanese text should be the same for each type of cut or fold, so you should be able to match them up using my legend:

The fine dotted lines are positioning lines for attaching the pieces later – do not fold or cut along these lines.

Cutting the pieces

Use a sharp craft/xacto knife and a self-healing mat (or some thick scrap cardboard to rest your work on) to cut along all the ‘cut’ lines for each piece. You do have to cut accurately for the piece to come together properly, so cut slowly and carefully. If you haven’t tried papercutting before, you can use a metal ruler along the line you want to cut to guide you. I did this for my first model, then braved freehand cutting, which is much faster. The easiest way I have found to control the knife is to rotate the work so you make all your cuts in the same direction – from left to right (right-handers) or right to left (left-handers).

Folding

Refer back to the instructions to see where you need to fold the pieces. I recommend you score each line first – this makes it much easier to make your fold in the right place. To do this, use a blunt pointed tool (e.g. a bone folder or a darning needle) and a ruler to ‘draw’ along each line. You don’t need to press hard – you don’t want to cut into the paper, just dent it so it will naturally crease along that line when you fold the paper. I scored all the lines on the front side of the paper, and then mountain- or valley- folded each line as shown in the instructions.

Assembly

Once everything is cut and folded, it’s time for the fun part: assembling the model! The tabs are all numbered in the order you need to stick them down. Refer back to the diagrams in the instructions if you aren’t sure where to stick the tabs – it is not always obvious, but the instructions have diagrams with arrows showing where each tab should be stuck.

A note on adhesives: Don’t use a glue stick! It doesn’t grab the paper tightly enough, and your model won’t stay together. A general purpose white glue (I used Tacky Glue), applied sparingly to each tab, works very well. Apply glue to the first tab and position it. Hold the two layers of paper in place for a few seconds until the glue ‘grabs’ the paper and it stays in position when you release your pressure. Then apply glue to the next numbered tab, and repeat the process until all the tabs are glued down and the model is complete!

Conclusion

Making paper models is time-consuming and precise, but the end results can be quite amazing. Seeing your model come together at the end is worth all the effort of painstakingly cutting out all those pieces. Just take your time and enjoy the process 🙂

Here are some of my favourite sites where you can find paper models to print and assemble:

• Konica Minolta Environmental Papercraft (the models above are from this site)
• Canon 3D Papercraft
• Yamaha Paper Crafts