Origami Mommy

Recyclable craft quickies

Here are 2 super-quick craft projects you can do with your little ones.

First, a nice summery fish tank. I got the idea from my brother who made a fish tank with his little boy and even provided imaginary "fish food" (using an empty spice container). All this is is tissue paper inside a clear plastic container, and your child can create fish of different colors to put inside. Simple, but somehow incredibly delightful for little ones (especially toddlers).

This next project takes a bit more time, but is great for kids who love to paint. Cut up milk cartons to make bridges and highways, and arrange them on a painted roadway (or river, or both). Use toilet tissue rolls as columns to support the bridges. We used a cut up paper grocery bag to paint on. Connect several together and you could make something quite elaborate!

I love encouraging children to provide handmade props for their toys!

Tutorial: A bouquet of paper hyacinths

Daniel came home from school a few weeks ago clutching a little bouquet of flowers he proudly presented to me. They were super-easy to make, as he showed me, and you can make a lot of creative decisions to make this project your own - size, color, type of paper, etc. I tried lengthening the flowery part and they came out looking like hyacinths (or some other similar type flower - I'm not really good with flower names, so if you can help me out here please do!)

I love the possibilities here - made with construction paper, they have more structure and shape; made with tissue paper, they are airier and lighter. You can see examples of both in the first photo of this post. I'll demonstrate below with origami paper, but I love the look of tissue paper flowers too.

Begin with two pieces of paper, one for your flower and one for the stem. Any size, as long as it's roughly square.

Start rolling up the stem paper as tightly as you can into a little paper roll. Secure with tape. I cut my stems in half to get two stems out of one piece of paper, but you can leave it as is, of course.

Take your piece for the flower and fold it in half, then fold in half again, or else fold into thirds. Really, you can fold any way you like, as long as you have some closed-fold sides to cut into later.

Daniel folded his like the picture above, but to get the hyacinth look, I found it was helpful to fold like the picture below - into thirds, slightly uneven, with two closed folded edges on the same side. 

Begin cutting through those closed folds at intervals, but not all the way to the other side, just like the photo below. Keep on cutting till you reach the end.

Now, attach one end to your stem with some tape, and then begin rolling, moving ever so slightly down the stem as you do so. Secure the end with tape.

If you use tissue paper the petals will fall gracefully; depending on the thickness of the construction paper you use you might want to tease out some of the petal layers. Other than that, you're done. Make a whole bunch and put them together in a small vase by a window - so pretty!

This last photo is of the bouquet Daniel brought to me - I love how child-friendly and quick this project is.

A craft a day

Summer vacation has started at last. In Japan the school year begins in April and runs until March and summer vacation is typically only about 5-6 weeks long.  It's taking a bit of time to find our groove, but I made a list of daily goals and jobs. One of our goals is to do a daily craft. Here's some of what we've done so far.

Painted peg people, painted with paint markers and inspired by these darling dolls.

I was also enchanted by the spool dolls at Sweet Sweet Life. Perhaps a little house next?

and fabric covered rocks, inspired by Red Bird Craft's sweet story stones:

I have no mod podge or other decoupage materials here so these were just made with a wash of glue and water. Collecting the perfect rock for these was part of the fun. I think the peg people and rocks could do with a final coat of acrylic sealer but I'm a bit leery of using that while pregnant...

More crafts are in the works....origami flowers, embroidery and sewing, more recyclable crafts. I'll share our projects as we go along!

Sewing on Mt. Fuji

We escaped Tokyo over the weekend for a little weekend trip with friends to Mt. Fuji and a lake called Yamanaka-ko. While the rest of the group went into a hot spring and went swimming, I dug into a bag of felt and fabric scraps I'd brought along for some handsewing projects because it was so wrenching to be torn away from my sewing machine just when I'd started falling in love with it so.

Before I left, I made a new skirt and a dress for Mia. The dress was made of Japanese double-gauze fabric (which I adore - two more double-gauze fabric dresses are in the works right now), and was loosely based on the pillowcase dresses that you see tutorials for everywhere. I sewed elastic in the front and back and then made bias tape out of the material that I used in the armholes and for shoulder straps because I had no ribbon. I realize I am much happier winging it when making a dress rather than sticking to a precise pattern. I made a matching scarf out of the same double-gauze fabric with a pale pink striped cotton backing on the other side.

I also made a skirt out of a small piece of Heather Ross's Far Far Away fabric by Kokka, combined with a tiny ruffle made of Rowan fabric.

This, too, I made without a pattern. I just made each tier a bit bigger than the one on top and then used my newly-learned ruffling techniques (making a loose running stitch along the top and then pulling gently on the bobbin threads to gather) to experiment. I learn something new with each sewing project. This time I learned that I have to pay close attention while cutting fabric so I don't ruin the design - there are no whole unicorns on this skirt anywhere, which was a great disappointment!

I also made some bags - a tiny treasure pouch for Mia to carry small toys in and a larger tote bag for me out of canvas. I especially like the button detail on the bottom.

We went to a few really nice places on this trip. It was balm to my soul to be away from people and buildings. I was raised in the countryside so living in cities all these years and raising my children in urban areas has been hard for me. 

Mountains and water were everywhere and the weather was cool, although foggy. The fogginess made it challenging to take good photos, and in the end we never did get any good photos of Mount Fuji, although we drove up partway by car and then hiked a little bit up the mountain.....just a bit.

We also went to a children's nature park where they could play around in the water....

make things out of wood....that woodpile, heaven for my little boys! and saws and chisels and hammers and nails everywhere....

My brave friend allowed her foot to be used as leverage while the kids were wielding their saws...!

While the others were busy with their activities, I hand-sewed a bunch of little felt things and also got started on some embroidery at last. I don't think I was too successful with my first batch of felt mascots at all, but my children loved them and loved being able be involved in choosing colors and that's all that matters. 

As evening approached we got settled into an inn...

and then ate a lovely dinner

Sparklers afterwards....so much fun on a summer evening!

Recycled milk carton truck tutorial

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the highlights of our children's Japanese kindergarten was the annual "play store" (omiseyasan gokko) where the oldest children would create beautiful handmade toys, origami sweets and vegetables, jewelry, sushi, and other such things for the younger ones. One of the things our boys learned to make there were trucks and vehicles like these, with real working wheels.

These are very easy to make from recyclables. 

Assemble your materials first:

You'll need straws, bamboo skewers, water bottle caps, and milk or juice cartons.

Tools you will need are a paper or box cutter (for adult use only!), scissors and tape and decorative paper, and glue.

The first step, putting holes in the bottle cap wheels, is for adults only, and if you have impatient little ones, it might be best for you to do this before making the trucks. In fact, if you prepare a whole bunch of these in advance you can set up a little vehicle factory. Your children could also get to work decorating their cartons while you do this part.

Take the box cutter (or a small knife) and make a small hole in the center of each bottle cap. I found that the easiest way to do this was to place the bottle cap on a folded washcloth on a table, place just the tip of the box cutter in the center, and press down while twisting the bottle cap around (by turning the washcloth, thus avoiding having to touch the bottle cap with your fingers and getting too close to that blade!). Definitely do put the bottle cap on some sort of surface to provide traction while cutting.

Next, cut your straws to size - just a bit bigger than the width of the carton.

Start assembling the wheels and axles. First, stick the end of a skewer into one of the holes. Add a dab of glue if you'd like. 

You can actually stick the skewer in the bottle cap the other way which might be easier for kids because it's more stable and less frustrating. 

Next, add the straws.

Once the straw is in place, trim the skewer down with scissors (another adult-only job), and stick the skewer through another bottle cap.

Now you can tape these onto the bottom of a carton and your vehicle is done, aside from decoration, which is what your children will have the most fun with. 

If your children want to make a dump truck or cut out windows and/or doors, they should do that before you put the wheels on. Making a dump truck is very easy - you just cut out part of the side and bottom of the milk carton and then stick it back in the other way, attaching with tape. It really works! Fire engines were popular in our house too as were buses and passenger cars.

Once you have the wheels and axles down pat you can stick them onto anything, really, like water bottles or small boxes. If you want to make trains, connect the train cars with the bit of straw you cut off the axles (this is especially great if you use bendy straws).  

Here are some photos from Japanese children's craft books for more ideas! I especially love the corrugated cardboard around the wheels in the last photo. 

Sushi play food tutorial

One of my favorite memories from my boys' kindergarten years in Japan was an event held every year. The oldest children in the school would work for weeks preparing all sorts of items for a huge play store. They'd make toys, fruit and vegetables, sushi, sweets and ice cream, jewelry and bags, all from recyclables. Some of the materials they used included newspaper, milk cartons, water bottles, straws, shopping bags, gift wrap, plastic wrap, cardboard, toilet paper rolls, etc. Meanwhile, the younger children in the school would make their own little shopping bags, wallets, and money, and then the store would open, the young ones would troop in, and the older ones would proudly "sell" their gorgeous little creations. This always led to weeks of exciting follow-up play in our own home. 

Making handmade items for house play or store play seems to be really popular here.  Adult make things like felt sweets.  Children make their own versions from paper and recyclables. The sushi shown here is quite easy for children to do.

First of all you will need a few of these or some other similar styrofoam packing. Here,  this is used to wrap fruit in in the grocery store. To be honest, I'm not sure if they even use this back home - if not, you can easily substitute with styrofoam peanuts, shredded paper, or even small amounts of wadded up paper towels or tissue.

Make a small cylinder using the stuffing of your choice, then wrap it with black construction paper and tape. Cut to the length you want your sushi to be. That's all there is to it! Add on bits of red maguro (tuna), green cucumber, or yellow pickles with glue and then line them up in a little container (such as take-out sushi containers). You can cut the green "grass" that comes inside take-out sushi, and then use a wadded up small piece of green construction paper as wasabi and pink paper as pickled ginger.

Children get a real kick out of play food, especially if they make it themselves. I'll be posting more tutorials for other play store items in the next few weeks.

Felt shapes and an exciting shopping trip

(Hi all and welcome - I'm so glad you're here. if you're visiting from the Crafty Crow be sure to check out this post for a little, bento-related giveaway)

I love working with felt -  it is so easy for the novice sewer like me and it's suitable for handsewing, which is easier to do in a house with constant distractions. I have a few Japanese craft books about making homemade toys for children and I fell in love with this project - an utterly adorable little geometric shape set made of felt. 

My boys loved this sort of thing when they were little - all the pieces (usually wood or plastic in commercial sets) come in triangles, squares, and circles, and you can make endless patterns and pictures with them.

What I saw in the book was made with primary colors, which I think looked fantastic. In the colorway I chose here, organic, natural shapes might work better than severe geometric lines - I can even envision basic shapes like trees (with little apples to put on them), simple houses, cars, animals, people. 

Now, this wasn't handsewn and it was incredibly tedious to keep changing thread on my sewing machine (and to sew those tight little circles), but I think the end result is a lot of fun. It goes in a little cloth bag and makes an ideal travel toy. Here's my quick tutorial - all the pieces are made of double pieces of felt sewn together. Trace squares, triangles, and circles onto paper first and then cut two layers of felt for each piece. For variety some of them can be different colors on each side - just choose a thread which looks good with both. After sewing, do a final trim with scissors.

On another note, I had so much fun the other day. I went to a huge Japanese craft store called Yuzawaya. It's quite far from me, so I rarely get to go these days - no more than once or twice a year. It was such an exciting day for me.  

I've been wanting to build up a fabric stash for so long. I have so many projects burning away in my head and I can't even begin until I have a few more scraps and pieces here. Plus the boys are always coming home from school telling me they need an extra handkerchief (required), lunch mat (also required), little bag, etc. I'm still not happy with my stash - I love Japanese fabric and feel lucky to have such sheer variety here but I am longing for more vibrant patterns by my favorite designers who are hard to find here. But the longing is eased somewhat. One thing which helped was that I was able to pick up a bunch of fat quarters as well as a bias tape maker. As soon as I got home I started experimenting: 

I'm really looking forward to being able to trim things now! One of the first things I tried doing was making a skirt for Mia out of linen and putting on a newly trimmed pocket pocket, but she wouldn't try it on so I could hem it. I'm afraid she might not be a linen girl....Or it may be that she was disappointed that it wasn't pink.

I'm hoping it will help if I add some of these 

but I think she would really prefer a riot of color, the brighter and pinker, the better.

I don't know if she's going to be happy with the material I picked in this pile below to make her a little dress. It's a very light fabric but definitely lacks the vibrant punch she seems to love - it's a dark navy with teal colored flowers. The purple floral and solid fabrics are also for a dress for her, and the brown mushroom and blue dotted quilted materials will become book bags for each of the children.

I also picked up a bunch of plain linen and linen-cotton blend fabric. I love the soft colors. I have a few secret projects planned with this, mostly gifts so I can't say more right now!

Then, I found myself on another floor which I had totally forgotten about. The seventh floor of Yuzawaya in Kichijoji is chock full of beads as well as zakka kits. Amazing! I got so excited. There were a bunch of zakka kits on sale and I picked up a few, including this little kit for a water bottle holder

There were many other kits there too - for placemats, coasters, even fabric slippers. I already started one kit, though the embroidery and button and strap are not on there yet. This is for a cup bag which is, again, another required item at Japanese school (preschool, not elementary). You bring your own little cup to school for lunch. 

and then I picked up a bunch of little bits of trim. 

This is also the kind of place where you can pick up small bits of cotton fabric bundles like this, which is so fun to dream about.

There were so many other goodies- I picked up an embroidery hoop as well as some beading tools I'd been needing and some packs of beads, like the ones below. No matter what craft you do, there's something there - for needle felting, basket making, flower making, metalwork or leathercraft,  mizuhiki, lots and lots of washi (Japanese paper), knitting and crocheting, etc.

There! Now don't you feel like you went to Yuzawaya with me? minus the sore arms (no shopping carts!) and legs...

Baskets, boxes, and bowls

I thought it would be fun to share a few simple origami projects and ask - is there anything you'd like to see more of? I'm already preparing a tutorial for the baskets below for next week:

These are from a Japanese book on children's origami I have and are pretty straightforward.

These star boxes are popular among children and are quite easy:

if you tuck the ends under and secure them, they make pretty cool looking bowls:

Origami for the home is my new favorite thing - here's another kind of bowl:

and yet another which you may already know how to do - I know I learned this as a child growing up in the U.S.  It's one of those little things children make and write on to tell fortunes. Using pretty paper and turning it upside down makes a huge difference, doesn't it?

Are you wondering what those little balls are? Those are snacks for babies and children - they melt in your mouth and are considered safe for little ones.  They're plain, but a bit sweet. The flowers are just little plum-flavored rice crackers.

I've also finally mastered tiny boxes, which are so much fun! There are lots of variations of those; here are 2 of my favorites. These here are very simple, classic boxes with a lid (I know they're a bit crooked!)

and this one is sort of similar to the origami cube I showed you a few days ago:

What I like about origami is that once you master a few basic folds and get a few projects under your belt, you begin to develop an intuitive sense for how other projects should go. You may even begin to develop the ability to create new projects of your own, although that hasn't quite happened to me yet. I love the feeling of doing multiple folds that seem to be going nowhere and then suddenly seeing it all fall into place at the end. I think that children learn a lot from experiencing that sort of magic.

Let me know what you'd like to learn how to do!

Tissue paper flower tutorial

One of my favorite things about living in Japan is the fact that my children have learned so many beautiful crafts at school on a daily basis. Their Japanese kindergarten, which each of them attended until age 7, was completely play-based and all the children burst out of school every day with recycled shopping bags filled to the brim with playthings they made. Our job as parents was to regularly provide the school with clean, empty recyclables (milk cartons, plastic bottles, shopping bags, miscellaneous boxes and ribbons and papers), and to find a place for all these treasures once they came home. The best thing about making your own playthings is that your child learns to see treasure in trash and found materials, and gains confidence that he can always make something for himself to play with. Daily crafting gives fine motor skills a real boost, too.

My younger son Daniel graduated from Japanese kindergarten this past spring. Graduates are sent off at a beautiful ceremony and party. Parents work in secret for weeks beforehand making all sorts of handmade paper creations to adorn the party room.  My favorite decorations were the garlands of tissue paper flowers like the ones shown above. These are a simple yet beautiful craft which both boys learned to do during their kindergarten years. These are quick and easy for little hands to make.  My children love making these celebratory garlands for us to use at home for anniversaries or birthdays or just-because days. They're also beautiful on top of a wrapped gift in lieu of ribbon.

Here's how you get started.

Take a few sheets of tissue paper (5-10 sheets). Contrasting or complementary colors are nice. Lay them out flat on a table in front of you, stacked on top of one another.

Begin to fold them from one end, accordian-style, like a fan (very important). 

When you've folded all the way to the end, fasten a rubber band or tie a piece of string to secure in the middle.

Lay it down on the table and begin fanning the ends out on both sides, as shown below.

Now start to gently separate the papers from one another and fluff them up towards the center one layer at a time.

You're done! Try this with different colors or different sized pieces of paper. The bigger the paper, the more sheets you'll need to fill out the flower. One neat variation would be to trim the ends of the folded paper with craft scissors to make little zigzags or wavy edges after you fasten it in the middle (but before spreading out the edges). 

Let me know how your children enjoy this project!