origami bows

i love doing origami and i love bows, so when i saw this how-to-make origami bows on pinterest i knew i had to create some. of course, the instructions are in japanese, but luckily the photos are nice enough that you can figure it out. the left side of the picture above are the instructions that i found on pinterest and all the rest are the bows that i created. i made the bright lime bow first as my test, which alex ended up using on her gift to her cousin-to-be. i created four more origami bows and used those to decorate all the other gifts for the recent baby showers. they're so cute and really easy to make once you figure out the instructions. and depending on where exactly you put your folds you can make a bigger center part or smaller and so forth. i think i might have to create these for all my gift giving.

modular origami ball decorations

i love origami but i usually feel like what's the point or what am i going to do with it once i'm done. that's why i find it so nice to use origami as an excuse to make party decorations. alex's beach birthday party this year has the blue, orange and white color scheme so i used solid origami paper in those colors for all the pieces. alex will be turning 5 this year, and there happens to be 5 arms on our dining room chandelier, so i made 5 origami balls. two of the balls require 40 pieces of folded paper while the other three only required 6, 6 and 24. if you fold a few pieces almost every night while watching tv and teaching your kid how to do beginner folds you'll be done in no time. i found some polka dot grosgrain ribbon in blue and orange that i glued into each ball to hang them from the arms of the light. i tried to keep them relatively short so that they don't interfere with people's point of view while eating at the table, but they had to be long enough to fit over and around the light in order to hang them and i wanted them to hang at different lengths as well. alex really likes them too and loves to do origami herself. she's working thru a beginner book with mostly animals and has mastered the dog and cat already.

modular origami flowers

i've been away on vacation for the past couple of weeks, and had no access to the internet!! well, i could have travelled to the library to utilize their wifi, which i considered, but when the weather is that nice you just don't leave the lake side. on that note, i had all these rainy day crafts planned (because you just never know if you're going to have a week straight of rain or sun, warm or cold...), but we had such beautiful weather that we hardly created any art. we did do some rock and stick painting that we'll turn into finished projects later. and since it was so warm, crocheting wasn't really appealing to me, so mostly i read and did some origami. i've been folding away working towards making these modular flowers that will group together to make a large modular ball that i plan to use as decoration at my daughter's birthday party at the end of the year. five sheets of paper make one flower and it takes 12 flowers to make one ball. i'm hoping to make 3 balls to decorate the party: a black and white one, a pink and green one, and a polka-dot one. at least that's the plan, right now i'm just folding, i'll assemble later.