6: Papercraft.

I discovered the art of papercraft accidentally one day about two years ago while I was looking on Google Images for a picture of the Weighted Companion Cube from Portal. Instead of a regular picture of the cube from the game, I found this:

I wanted one. I had to have it. So I downloaded the template and went about trying to cut and glue the pieces together with regular scissors, super glue and a pair of tweezers.

This was a bad candidate for a first papercraft, I soon found. It was tiny and complicated. I learned very quickly that papercraft is not as easy as it looks. My first paper Companion Cube was a failure that got thrown out. But I was determined, so I went on my way, looking for other templates. I soon found myself looking at blogs all about papercraft, and finding that there were more than just paper Companion Cubes. There were all sorts of things - characters, food, animals, toys - you name it, there is probably a papercraft of it.

I read different tips and found that an X-acto knife with a cutting board is generally considered the best method for cutting out pieces of papercrafts, and learned that super glue isn't really your best bet when it comes to putting them together. I bought some good old-fashioned Elmer's and an X-acto knife, and I went crazy. Soon the top shelf of my desk was filled with all sorts of characters, all made out of paper. Eventually that was too full and I had to start putting them on my printer. I got more and more skilled and started making more complicated things.

Two years later, I'm still papercrafting. I've had a few failures here and there, mostly due to poor design on the creator's part. But the top shelf of my desk is now a random pile of papercrafts. You can't even see a lot of them. Some of my favorite ones, or the newer ones, are on my printer so that they are more visible. These include a complicated model of American McGee's Alice and a detailed Companion Cube that's about five inches tall. I've given away papercrafts as gifts to several people. Although the work is not fully mine, I think the effort that goes into it makes it special.

Currently, I am working on this papercraft of Osaka and Chiyo from Azumanga Daioh:

It's fairly complicated, and I've run into a lot of problems along the way, both mine and the designer's faults. I've been working on it for a couple weeks now (I do have other things to get done, you know) but I'm very close to being finished. Osaka has been done for well over a week but Chiyo has been going very slowly. I just have to finish up her arms and legs and I can put her on the base next to Osaka and it will be complete.

2: Paper stars.

I've enjoyed origami since I was young. Folding paper and making neat little figures always amused me.

When I was 12, a classmate introduced me to origami "lucky stars". You take a strip of paper, fold it into a pentagon and puff it up, like so:

(Lucky star instructions by carriephlyons.deviantart.com)

I thought these were the coolest origami I'd ever seen. Most of the origami I'd done was two-dimensional, flat, and, well... kind of boring. These were not only 3D, they were cute! I had my mom take me to the import store so I could buy a canister of strips to fold them out of.

I have no idea what happened to all those stars I folded when I was 12. There were probably about 100. I don't really know how many strips were in that can. But after that little fit of folding fun, I dropped the whole idea and forgot about it.

Until two years ago.

I started papercrafting (yet another post will be made for that) and I found that at times I wanted to make things out of paper but I wasn't in the mood for glue or cutting out complicated pieces. I just wanted something simple that didn't take a lot of thinking.

I remembered those origami stars.

I, once again, bought strips for making them. I folded every single one. I got better and better at it as time went on. Unfortunately, there wasn't much time for that; I went through all the strips very quickly.

Then I found out you could print lucky star strips. Print them?! What nonsense, I thought!

How wrong was I?

I bought scrapbook paper and cut it down so I could run it through the printer and get the template on the paper. Then I cut that down so that I had lots of strips made out of scrapbook paper in various patterns. I spent a lot of time in December 2007 folding stars. I bought a large plastic lidded container at the Dollar Tree specifically for storing the stars.

While at my grandma's house, I hit 1,000 stars.

(That's actually a picture of some of my stars, in case you were wondering.)

Even though I'd hit 1,000, I still kept going. Everyone asked me the same thing: what are you going to do with those stars? I really didn't know. I thought maybe I'd give them to friends, maybe I'd leave them in random places for people to find. I did a little bit of both for a while. My friend Ashley suggested I hang them from my ceiling, and I ended up with about 100 up there. But they still weren't really going anywhere... until recently.

Another hobby (and another entry) that I have is making jewelry out of polymer clay. I've had the fortunate opportunity a few times to sell it online. Each time I sell jewelry, I package it with some stars, like so:

I think this is going to be the final resting place for a lot of my stars. It's a good compromise; they're not getting thrown in the trash, they're being given to friends and valued customers as an extra little surprise. They don't feel like such a waste of time anymore.

Except for this beauty, which I made last week:

Yeah, do you see my hand there? This thing is over a foot wide. It's hanging from my ceiling, right in front of my window. I made it by taping together a lot of pieces of printer paper, end to end. I think I used 16, but if I did it again, I'd probably use 18 to make sure it was strong enough to actually puff it up more properly. I had to use tape in several places to hold it together. But I think it was worth it. Every time I look at it, it makes me smile. It feels like the culmination of my star-making habit.

That doesn't mean, however, that I'm going to stop; I'll probably be making paper stars for a long time.