Fairly Easy Christmas Craft: Origami

These are the projects we worked on today. We have what's meant to be a gingerbread house (this one is very easy to fold), a paper crane, and a red bird. It makes for happier families if I do the folding and then let the first years apply glue and glitter as much as they like. In fact, we also made a lovely little star box but the first year boy filled that with so much glitter and glue that it won't be dry until Christmas, 2006. A handful of other projects don't scan very well, but this is a good sampling.

I am not a handy person. I am not good with small, fiddling, detail work which requires care and attention. I have ten thumbs. On one hand. I don't know what's on the other hand, but it's not very useful when it comes to this sort of thing. So while Origami ought to be easy, I find it a challenge.

I also have trouble with spacial skills, and the directions to every origami book I have ever used completely undid me, leaving me sitting among wads of crumpled paper and fistfuls of hair I'd pulled out of my head. Until I found this one.

Origami, by Hideaki Sakata is the first book I found where I could understand the directions. I still can't do everything in the book. I still don't find most things easy, although now a handful of things are pretty simple. And since I figured out how to do some origami projects from this book, the instructions in other books are more understandable to me, too.

When we lived in Japan we had Japanese high school students come stay with us over the winter break. One of the things all our students did for us is to fold paper cranes, stars, and medallions. We had the students sign their creation, and then I threaded a loop of gold thread through them and dipped them in melted wax to preserve them, and we hang them on the tree every year. Some of them are starting to look battered, but they've done well through the years.

Origami isn't just for folding paper animals and things like that. Easy Origami, by Kazuo Kobayashi and Chiharu Sunayama, has directions for folding napkins, making folded paper gifts such as little frames, holders for business and credit cards, paper boxes and fun containers for snacks at parties.

If you're not as inept and maladept as I am with figuring out most origami instructions, you might find some fun projects here. Links to other easy paper crafts are at Ambleside's HELP project page.


Update: How cool is this? Mrs. Happy Housewife blogged about this yesterday, and she has several easy crafts to make, along with a link to a very clear, easy to follow website on how to make the paper cranes (scroll down her post for the link). Like Mrs. Happy, I have also just set them in the branches, and that's very pretty. The ones we dipped in wax were made by friends we wanted to remember, so we wanted them to last longer.