Origami - What I Learned on the Internet Today

I have a habit of being easily distracted.  Especially when I'm procrastinating!

Today's adventure began when I needed to look up a grammar question which took me to Quora [as easily a time-sink as YouTube] which took me to this:

Can Origami be used for something else?

which led to The Modern Science of Origami.

Too cool!

Red Bear's Teacher-Daughter might be inspired by this, I'm feeling tickles on the edges of my comprehension, in the olden days of complete brain function I could have had some fun with this.

Ugly Paper Contest - September 2016

The Challenge: Red Bear and I were each to make two cards.  One to mail to each other, and one to mail to Kidlet. We were allowed to choose our own base paper.

These are the papers we chose.

Papers

These are the results.

Zoo's Cards

Red Bear's on the Left; Zoo's on the right

Backstory
A long time ago, in another life, circa 2011, the Ugly Paper Contest was born.  Kidlet had purchased a big pad of truly ugly paper.  Red Bear and I were teasing her about it and wanted to know what on earth would she ever use such ugly paper for.  The Ugly Paper contest of course!

Of Course! How silly of us.

The first time, all three of us crafters made our attempts and The Farmer aka Himself aka Hubby, chose the winner. Quite often that is how the contests progressed and I still don't know if he ever knew who did what.  Kidlet and Red Bear most often won, I don't think I ever did.

He did have a farm to run however and wasn't always available.  One of us would choose the paper, make the "rules", and be the final judge.  Kidlet often chose the Worst colour combinations and came up with challenging rules.  Like the time "must use at least one alpha stamp but it must be part of the design, not part of a word".

Left: Red Bear
Center: Kidlet
Right: Zoo

Sometimes the background or base paper was part of the challenge, sometimes we could choose whatever we liked, or from within a colour family.  Sometimes the rules would change part-way through the challenge.

The best part was always seeing how different the results were from the same starting point. We also got to learn about each other.  Red Bear gravitates towards heart shapes and the colour red.  Zoo likes circles and either green and pink or green and peach. Kidlet was never pinned down except for the yellow/purple colour combo.

These are always a lot of fun, inspire creativity, and really take the pressure off.  We're starting with "ugly" so it's not our fault if the result is ugly!

Before Red Bear moved across the country, we took the ugly paper pad, divided it into approximately three equal piles, wrote identifying numbers on the back, and each of the three of us had our own stash in a 9 x 12 envelope.  Also included were some embellishments, stickers, "add-ons". That is how years later we can still have Ugly Paper Contests with the same papers.

Zoo

p.s. As I write this post, it is exactly two years later, Red Bear is airborne on her way here to visit.  Recently some WoW Friends, purring and Bearminimum, asked to see some of my artwork.  I was sad to realize that I have been a very bad craft blogger.  This is the beginning of an attempt to make up for that.  Thanks, Guys! You two are wonderful friends of Kidlet, babysitting Mom.

A stamp technique for use with stamps without designs

Hello again. Here is the post I had planned to do next. Zoo sent me a Two Minute Tuesday YouTube video by Connie Stewart  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfpDahwmGzs&list=PLxCtNfpskJFdwaN-N-l1VWQ31GZrPZzRS&index=34&ab_channel=ConnieStewart    and the following is my first experimentation with the techniques. I had a blast, ended up with completely inked up hands and can't wait to do some more. 

The first stamp that I came across that was flat without any detail was a butterfly from the StampinUps Flight of the Butterfly stamp set (the all black on in the case).

I stamped the butterfly with my StampinUp Tangelo Twist ink pad, stamped it off a number of times on a scrap piece of paper, then used the chain link fence stamp by Finnabair, inked in StampinUp's Cajun Craze ink to add the detail. The difference in the below images is from the number of times I stamped it onto the scrap paper. I then tried to add the body of the butterfly in the correct place and it didn't work the best. That of course took me on a sidebar thought process into making my own MISTI type stamp placement tool but that will have to wait for a future post.

The below picture is all the design stamps I used in this technique practice. I will add others as I come to them. 

 

The next unadorned stamp I used was a simple flower from the StampinUp set called A Beautiful Thing. I did end up using the detailed stamp from that set and had difficulty placing it in the right spot of the stamped image (hence more thought into making my own MISTI).

Here on in, shows the end of session one of making new stamps from existing ones in my cupboard. Me, being me.. I could not see wasting the tap off twice ink onto scrap paper or my work surface, so you can see I incorporated the original inked plain flower onto the page and then stamped the new designs around it. I had sooo much fun doing this and the pages turned out so sweet.

Here is a closer up couple of the flower samples. As I said above, I inked in tangelo Twist and then I experimented inking the detail in the same tangelo twist and also in StampinUp's Cajun Craze and Island Indigo. 

These two StampinUp background stamps are my ultimate favourites so of course they came out in the experiment. One of my favourite designs with this new technique is using the right (lines) background stamp and using the twist. It produced the coolest design ever.

 Upon coming home later that day, I once again sat in my craft room and played with this new technique. This time I used my plain square stamps, which I had purchased years ago with ideas in my head that did not work in real life. As I never get rid of stamps, ever, I had them still for experimenting with and I love them both in the sampling.

These two stamps are made by Shadow Stamps and the small one is A1873 Background 1 and the big one is A1875 Shadow Stamp 111.

The colours I used for big square samplings were tangelo twist and cherry cobbler by StampinUp.

I used the design stamps from above but added more of the green background plates. These came from the local Rewards Store's clearance bin and don't have a brand name that I can find. They are not stamps per say but I use everything as stamps for the most part. (the sentiment stamp I borrowed off Zoo and didn't use until the blue samples using the small squares. A note about word stamps and this technique... they end up reversed and backward which upon talking to Zoo is a great idea for making reverse stamped images for things we have wanted to stamp in another direction. Another future post, lol.)

I love this sampling. The square is large and thus the design added is more defined. It is two colours I love together and in general makes my day.






For the final sampling, I used the small square and two darker colours. I used the Island Indigo and Navy by StampinUp and the finished product reminded me of denim which I love. This one took the longest and hurt the hand/elbow the most because the stamp was only about an inch square but it is so adorable.

After playing with the technique I, of course, had to make some cards. I used up all of the flower paper and then saved one of each of the square samplers to send to Zoo. As usual, the pictures don't show the true colours but I did try out some new flag sort of designs that came to mind for the first ones and then used up a butterfly on the remainder of the flower ones. I used my home made MISTI to place the three hellos om the strip of paper at the side.

For the first tangelo/cherry cobbler big square design card I used a Yo-Yo I had made months ago that was the perfect colour (see a couple of posts previous to this one). I used a pair of the kids funky scissors and I think it turned out beautiful.

I hate to cover up all the hard work of the sampling so I tried to make the designed paper the focal point for the most part. In the ones below I used up scraps from cutting the edges with the funky scissors and I love how they turned out.

I used my home made MISTI for placing the 'To' and 'You' words. I added the tag at the bottom but thought it needed some green at the top so added the  2 words.



Over all I had an awesome time playing with Connie Stewart's stamp kissing technique and look forward to doing some more in the future. We will see what comes first... me playing with this technique some more or something else Zoo sends me to focus my attention on. Your guess is as good as mine : )


Have a great night!

Red Bear

Corner Heart Punch

Good morning. I have had a little post it note with some information to make a post on the counter for a couple of weeks now and have finally sat down to do it. Funny how life gets in the way of the to-do list.

In any case... I had filled a little box of corner heart punches at Zoo's place before moving East, years ago. I have never used them and as the theme of this year is to use things I have had forever, it was high time to delve in. All the punches were on scrap pieces of paper of varying sizes and colours.

I first used the larger pieces that had a punch in each of the four corners. I used mainly Dollarama 6"x6" paper pads that I have had for years and not used. The two pads I used were the Rainbow Scrapbook and the Flower Scrapbook pads. I hope Zoo will add the name of the company who made the punch. I like how the hearts are not quite cut out and so I could add another layer of paper under the top of each heart to add dimension. The cards are bright and yet not too overpowering. I tend to not use patterned paper but this was a good use of the bolder patterns I had been avoiding. 

Having used up the larger pieces it was time to move onto the more narrow bits that only had two heart punched per piece. I used Zoo's Spellbinder's Curved Border's dies to make one edge more decorative. I was originally going to have a piece of the card slide in and out of the heart punch paper but then decided to just use a big flower instead. I added a coordinating colour under each corner punch to add interest and a small stamp in between. The big flowers are from using a friends dies and Big Shot years ago. I believe the biggest flower is from StampinUp and the smaller ones are from my McGill Petite Petals Punch and my Martha Stewart's Floral Anywhere Punch. A good use of paper I would not normally use

I have more punched corners remaining but ran out of time. I will get to them in the years to come.   Happy November!

Red Bear : )