Tiny Crafts Tuesday! A.K.A. immediate gratification day! I spent all day with Thomas, my sister and my adorable little niece so my pin project had to wait until after dinner. When it gets that late in the evening before I do something for the blog I usually start to dread it. Most of the time it  takes longer than I think it will and then I haven’t even started writing yet. However, not so on Tuesdays: this project took me less than 30 minutes to complete and that included watching the you tube tutorial. (The writing of this blogpost got delayed because of two episodes of Mad Men. Damn you, Donald Draper.)

I wanted to make this bow for today’s project. The pin I used linked through to a tutorial with pictures. Usually, I have a hard time doing origami just from pictures so I was happy to find the link to an instructional video (with the BEST music!) in the same blogpost.

Here are the supplies I used to make an origami bow brooch:

• (pink!) origami paper
• scissors
• safety pin
• tape

I started  by making valley and mountain folds…

(I used the white background of my notebook to get rid of that reflection of the light in the pictures. Also, I find that it makes it easier to fold neatly when you have a light background).

…and shaped my paper into the petal fold by pushing in the vertical and horizontal folds…

… then, I folded the top down. This is going to be the middle part of the bow. The bigger you make this fold, the bigger that middle part will be.

I then unfolded my paper again…

…and started to reinforce the folds of that square in the middle.

Then, I refolded the paper into the petal fold while at the same time I eased that square down inside the petal fold…

…making it look like this from the top…

…and like this from the front.

I folded down the top right side like so…

…and repeated this for all four top sides.

I opened this up and flattened down making the front look like this…

…and the back look like this:

I had to make four cuts along the top of the triangular folds…

…so it looked like this:

Then I folded up the lower flap of the paper like so…

…and started shaping the top of the bow…

…I repeated this for all four sides of the bow.

Then, I cut along that vertical line of the bottom square to create the ends of my bow…

…and folded the sides in to shape them.

I turned over my bow and folded in both ‘bow’ sides of the bow and tucked in the pointy bits.

Folding done!

The tutorial I pinned for this project leaves it like this but in the video the bow is shaped further by snipping of the ends. As this was going to be a brooch I liked that option better:

I attached a safety pin to the back of my bow with some tape…

…and I was done!

(one downside to doing your pin projects after dinner: bad lighting…)

I can really recommend the Paper Kawaii you tube channel: the tutorials are very clear and easy to follow (and girl has some serious tunes going on!). I also just started following her Instagram account and I think you should too. Be careful though, it is so cute you might just die.

 

 

Tomorrow I won’t be writing a blogpost. I will be taking a day together with my love to commemorate a loss we’ve suffered at the beginning of this year. I’ve been debating whether to share this story here and for now, I’ve decided not to. However, it’s also impossible for me to write a blogpost about something that’s particularly mundane like de-cluttering my house on a day that revolves around something so much bigger and all encompassing to me. I don’t mean to sound so vague it’s just that I can’t phrase it any better. For me, for now, this blog is not the space to write about this but I also didn’t want to stay away and pretend like I just skipped a day for no reason.