I Think I Just Redefined Small

Ever since I first learned to make paper cranes, back in like kindergarten, I’ve always had this strange obsession with trying to make them as small as I could. At first, that meant I cut a piece of origami paper in quarters and made them out of that. When I made my first set of 1000 cranes for one of my friends, they fit in a coffee can, and I thought that was good. Then the set of 1000 I finished last month fit into a jar. I’ve always wanted to know the smallest cranes I can make with my bare hands, and I figured now was a good time to test it out. These past few weeks, I’ve been too bogged down with homework to really do any crafts besides occasional cranes, so I thought that this would be a nice, quick craft I could do. I started with 5 squares, measuring 2, 1.75, 1.5, 1.25, and 1 cm square.

Surprisingly, I was able to make all of them fairly well (though the smallest ones did take a bit more time).  

I think that 1 cm is probably the limit of how small I can make them with this thickness of paper, though. Especially with the smaller cranes, the creases become extremely important, and with the last one there was barely enough paper to make the final creases at all…

It’s also amazing the difference in size between the cranes made from 2 cm and 1 cm squares!

Maybe I’ll eventually try to make even smaller cranes, but at least for now, I think these are pretty small. :)

If Wishes Were Horses, We'd All Be Eatin' Steak...

So, 1000 cranes grants you a wish. And now I can say that I've made over 3000 to give to my friends! But this last set... took waaaay longer than it should have. Like, I had planned to make 1000 little cranes in a jar to give to one of my friends on her graduation, but I kept forgetting, and by her graduation day, I had made only 500, so I gave them to her and promised her the other 500 soon... which ended up taking me over a year, because again, I kept forgetting... but now, they're done.

And just to give a scale of how big these guys are, all 500 of them fit in my hand...

They're as small as I can make them... at least, as of now.

Under the Sea

I feel like I've been slacking, since this is the only thing I finished in the past week... oh, well. This little octopus was a rather annoying pattern, though perhaps that was mainly because I made him pretty small, so it took a rather long time and a lot of effort to turn his arms right-side out. Also, I'm pretty sure the pattern isn't supposed to be made with felt, but something stretchier, because his head looks a bit odd...

Soft Kitty, Warm Kitty, Little Ball of Fur...

As I started making some more of the plushies for my friends for Christmas, I remembered that I had started these two little cotton candy-colored kittens last year, using the same pattern by VoodooTiki as the two sparkly ones that I had finished. So anyways, I figured that I should make sure to finish these little guys up this year. They turned out pretty good, though their heads are still a little off. Oh well. I made the teal one last, and I think it turned out a little bit better than the previous 3, at least.

I have also been working on a couple of other projects, including a couple of new pattern designs, but I’ll wait until they’re finished to post about them.

Getting a Head Start

Since last year my time-management skills for making Christmas presents was pretty much non-existent until too late, I decided it would be a good idea to start making them early this year. Especially since there are even more people on my list than last year… Also, it will hopefully give me more time to post them as I make them instead of all together, which was super long and time-consuming.

Anyways, I got two plushies finished yesterday. The first one is a little parrot, made with the Sun Conure pattern by Silver Seams. I accidentally attached his feet backwards, but he can still stand ok for a few seconds at a time, since I put pipe cleaners in his tiny feet.

The other one is this dolphin, made with a pattern by Runo. I’m glad I tried adding the mouth; I think it makes him cuter.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun

So… an awful lot has happened in the last few months, and it’s about time that I got caught up. First off, I did finish the gingerbread house for my Phantom of the Opera project. I had planned it out perfectly… except it ended up being too big, whether because the cookies expanded in the oven or whatnot, I don’t know. So I had to improvise, and I made it roughly half the size it was originally meant to be…

And the people didn’t end up working either, so I got frustrated and just turned it into the scene where the chandelier has fallen. Only I pretended everyone else had run out as well… You can’t see it in the picture, but behind the box seats, there’s a platform and stairs leading down, and it looks kind of cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I had forgotten to take a picture of it until after the project was all eaten. I’m thinking I might try to make a cardboard model at some point, to see how the full thing would have worked.

Also, I had lots of gingerbread left over, so I made a little baby gingerbread house with some of the extra.

Then, after school ended, I was hurrying to finish up all of the requirements I had left for the CILT (Camper in Leadership Training) program at Camp Cherith that I was doing, which involved a lot of crafts as well. Of course, I forgot to take pictures of a lot of them… but some of the things I made were a knit baby seal,

a little carved dragon,

a dragon banner,

and a woodburned Horde coaster.

I made a bunch of other crafts, too, including three little plushies- a Mew, a bat, and a narwhal, but I ended up giving them away before I remembered to take pictures of them… Oh well.

Then, while I was at camp, I woodburned this pair of Celtic dragons:

I also made this murre, also known as a guillemot, because that’s what I had decided on for my bird name, since at Camp Cherith all of the staff use bird names instead of their real names.

My CILT buddy, Twila made one too. Her bird name is Stella, after the stellar sea eagle.

Anyways, it was lots of fun! And even though it was a bit stressful up until the very end, Twila and I both finished CILT! :)

Which Came First, the Dragon or the Eggs?

…Well, that depends on whether you mean which was started first or which was finished first…

I started the dragon first, but we made the eggs while he was like halfway finished.

Because I like to leave the best for last, and also because it works better telling it in this order, I’ll talk about the eggs first. Of course, since me and my cousins are kind of nerdy, we were trying to think of what cool things we could make the Easter eggs look like. I suggested pokeballs. So, I made a masterball and my cousin Bobby made a normal pokeball. My masterball did have the circle-y things on the top, it’s just hard to see them, since I accidentally put them a little too far back.

I then decided to try to make hearthstones… and failed miserably. The first one, I tried using a clear crayon to keep everything but the swirl white, only I obviously missed a lot of the surface… Then I tried using shaving cream, since my mom and aunt were having fun with that method, so I tried coating all but the swirl part in shaving cream and dropping blue food coloring on the exposed part, but the dye bled through the shaving cream a bit… Then I tried making the swirl of food coloring in the shaving cream and dropping the egg on top, but that didn’t work much better… Oh, well.

Then I made an atom egg, and I tried to make a Horde symbol (I realized after the Horde symbol that I’m really bad at drawing in clear wax on eggs and sort of gave up…)

My uncle made some star trek eggs. My other cousin, Rosemarie, had the great idea of outlining the shapes in sharpie!

Rosemarie also made these awesome eggs with that technique!

So now, meet my little dragon- Hearth!

I named him that because he’s the same colors as a hearthstone. Originally, I was making him as more of an ice dragon, but then when I was making the hearthstone eggs, I randomly realized that he was the same color, too. My exclamation was actually met with complete silence, because only my dad had any clue what a hearthstone was, so the rest of my family just thought I was crazy… Anyways, I added the hearthstone symbol later, after I had named him Hearth, because I thought it was appropriate.

I made him using this pattern (which again I wasn't able to find again...), and the only changes I made to it were adding a chin piece (because for some reason I couldn’t find it online when I had found the pattern…) and adding an extra layer to his wings to give them more detail.

I ended up sewing the back white piece to the blue piece only on the bottom, and the two white pieces only on the top, and then I stitched the front/detail work white piece to the blue piece. I’m pretty happy with how it looks! :)