Every other week, CRAFT's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Craft: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.
By Meara O'Reilly, projects intern
My family reuses holiday wrapping paper to a hilarious extreme -- presents have been known to show up swathed in paper as old as I am! This year, I started trying to think of what to do with the little scraps of beloved prints that are just really too small to be useful.
Enter origami! I've been playing around with a couple of different instruction books recently (especially a pretty great one by Mari and Roshin Ono called Origami for Children: 35 Easy-to-follow Step-by-step Projects), seeing what I can do with different-sized scraps. I've found that clever folding can address various weaknesses or flaws in the recycled paper -- with enough folds, even the scariest snowman becomes a lovely abstract pattern.
So far I've been making delicate gift boxes for next year:
And multi-layered spinning tops that can be used for games or just for decoration:
Up next? Origami tessellations! I can't stop folding!
