Paper play

The unusually warm weather over the past few weeks means that in Southern England flowers are blooming and insects buzzing around as if it was mid March, not mid January.

I have been having a bit of a break from beading and knitting to play with paper. Just before Christmas OH gave me a pile of old maps and the instructions for making paper ornaments, printed off from a link on the Purple Podded Peas blog. Instead of making the ornaments I surprised him by using the maps to cover a handmade notebook as a Christmas present (see my previous post).. A week ago we went to Hobbycraft and I bought a small glue gun and a 2 inch paper punch in their sale.


The ornaments call for between 45 and 75 circles of paper. There was no way on earth that I was going to be able to cut that number of circles out accurately with scissors! So last Sunday afternoon I sat down with an old copy of 'Mollie Makes', the paper punch and the glue gun.

They are fun to make and I think that they look really attractive. I aim to make a few more and display them in a bowl on the coffee table in our living room.

The instructions can be found here. Whilst browsing through old posts on the 'Rhymes with Magic' blog I came across a kusudama flower ball. It was made from old maps. My mind at once went back to the maps that OH had given me before Christmas.

When I was growing up we did not have the internet and very limited television. Making things was my main source of entertainment. I remember watching a programme on TV in the 1970s, presented by Roger Harbin on origami. I was hooked. I bought several of his books and spent many happy hours creating boats, birds and boxes out of squares of paper. Seeing that kusudama ball brought it all back to me. I took one of the maps, cut it up into 3 inch squares, heated up the glue gun and started to create a flower ball.

Here is the result. As you can seeI couldn't resist adding beads (6mm pearls) to my finished creation. I think that it rounds it off nicely.


Finally I have been making some more notebooks. I think that I have got the basics under my belt, so now is the time to start experiment with different types of binding. I will let you know how I get on.


Now I feel the need to get back to my beading. I am working on an elaborate collar. More about that in future posts.