Sometimes you have to get creative to get creative. Like with our monthly CraftHack meetups – they’re free, so that pushes us to be resourceful when it comes to providing materials and supplies.
Robin Corey volunteered to do last month’s demo on paper quilling, a technique that involves winding strips of paper around a tool to get spiral shapes.
While you can buy a quilling tool for around 8 bucks, ordering 20 for a free class would get pretty pricey.
She found a super solution buried in her Pinterest boards: make your own from a cork and a tapestry needle. Basically, stick the needle in the center of the cork and glue it, cut off the top with wire cutters, file any sharp edges, and you have a super inexpensive tool that makes winding strips of paper for quilling easy.
She made about 20 of them for less than the cost of buying just one, and we all got to take one home for future projects.
PS If you live in Phoenix and like to make stuff, make sure you’re planning to come to Craft Camp this Saturday!
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Plastic bottle cacti by Veronika Richterová. While she has special processes for creating her cactus art, it’d be fun to try making a simpler version of these.
Sewing Lab has a tutorial for a cute stuffed fabric cactus that’s the perfect place for pins and needles.
5. Possibilities
C2C Gallery in Grand Haven, Michigan suggests using cactus seeds in artwork. What they had in mind were Helen Otterson’s botanical-inspired ceramics. (Like Succulent Blossom.) But it made me wonder about using seeds in collage to add some depth and texture.
Have you ever created something inspired by cactus or using actual parts of a cactus plant?
Did you know there’s a replica of the Greek Parthenon in a Nashville, Tennessee park? Yep. And there’s an art museum and gallery space inside.
I’m glad spring finally arrived in Tennessee, and it was great to see Michelle’s boat float by!
If you make a paper boat and take a photo where you live, you can email it to hello (at) travelcraftjournal.com OR post it on Twitter with hashtag #paperboatseverywhere and mention @travelcraftjrnl. We just might share it!
In case you ever want to print some really big stuff, there’s now a plotter at Gangplank that prints on 3-foot wide rolls of paper. Not like photos, more like black-and-white line drawings. It would be great for patterns, maps, large schematics, and probably lots of things we haven’t thought of yet.
I was looking for ideas of something we could make with it during the May CraftHack meetup. I’m not sure I found anything that would work for that, but I did come across some interesting stuff.
Coal Drawing Machine (Belgium) – Carlos Amorales created an art installation in a former coal mine that features a modified plotter printing with charcoal.
Then I fell asleep and dreamed of looking for plotter crafts.
Really. In the mall, there was a store that still had a Christmas display in their window with 3 paper figures that were as tall as I was: an angel with beautiful paper cut wings, a boxy snowman, and maybe a Nutcracker. They had been printed with a plotter, cut out, and folded up (Folidify craft style). So I went to ask the store owners if they would let us have the files for our CraftHack project. They showed me this adorable little papercraft camper that was a cross between a paper VW bus I’d seen and the Fisher-Price camper I had as a kid. (Remember those?) Of course, I still don’t have the files. Because it was a dream.
But if you have any fabulous real-life ideas for projects that start with a plotter printer, let me know!
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Photos via sites as noted, except for the top one, which I took of the actual HP DesignJet 600 at Gangplank.
