I fell off the wagon a lot last year. I would buy materials or scrounge materials from the house with the idea of making this really cool project for Iron Craft. However, with a 1 week turn around time and my reading patterns (which meant I decided what project I might want to do often on Monday only a short time before posting) I didn't give myself enough time to make a project and I chose projects that were super time consuming.
The first project for this year's Iron Craft is paper. I had this awesome idea but it involved nice paper, printed on a better printer than our home printer, a big of mosaic/decoupage, an exacto knife, spray adhesive and a foam board. As I never managed to get myself to either an art shop or a Michael's for any of the things I didn't have I had to scrap the idea. Then my husband made some random comment about the dog and I was off.
Paper Dogs. So much better behaved than normal dogs.
I was going to cut sheets of brown paper to the 6-inch squares, but then I decided that was also too prone to error and that I didn't need my dog to be natural colored.
Instead, I raided my origami paper stash.
I haven't done any origami in years. When I worked at Sasuga Books over 10 years ago, I spent a lot of time either there or in the Porter Exchange and bought things like origami paper a lot more regularly.
This paper is from the Echo collection, and I don't remember where I got it. The paper is acid free and uses a soy based ink. Very eco friendly. The paper is nice and thick, which makes it ideal for this application where you want a sturdy origami product.
I used these instructions for making my origami dog. I used a bit of glue (and a glue stick) to attach the head to the body and then dug out some googly eyes. Everything is better with googly eyes.
This is a really cute dog and super quick. The folds are easy to make and the site explains with lot of pictures how to do the different folds.
Of course, this morning after I tried to adjust the origami-ness so it would stand again (I pressed it under a card box a little too long and it didn't want to stand), one of the eyes fell off. It is currently being superglued on. I will not be defeated, and now I have another cute thing to put in my office!