Craft Day: Origami Wreath

My friend Brook and I have decided to start hosting a monthly get-together we're calling "Craft Day." Yesterday was our first go at it, and the results were inspiring, if I do say so myself. I thought it might be nice to do a feature on my blog about each craft, so today marks the first "Craft Day" post. My goal is to share a new craft every month with instructions and photos detailing the process. I hope to encourage all you crafty types (and not so crafty types too!) to get out your X-acto knives and rulers and start creating.

To start things off I've selected a very simple origami wreath. I found the instructions over at Domesticali. You can view them here. She does a fabulous job explaining how to put this wreath together, but I felt compelled to do my own tutorial as well.

You can use any decorative paper you like. I had this book of old fonts from college, and I thought it might make an interesting pattern so that's what I used. You can use paper varying in weight from very light (20 lb standard computer paper) to very heavy (100 lb cover paper). But we found a paper weight somewhere in between to be the best (roughly 40 lb). If you want to use a heavier paper, I would suggest making one of these wreaths with a light weight paper first, just to get the hang of it, and then work your way up to heavier papers. The lighter papers are easier to work with at first.

To start, cut 8 4cm x 8cm strips of paper.

Then fold each piece in half lengthwise (If your paper is one-sided, make sure the patterned side is on the outside)...

so you end up with something like this:

Then fold each piece in half width-wise, like this:

Now open up the piece and, with the open side of the original fold facing up, fold down the left side of the paper to create a triangle like this:

Now do the same thing to the right side so you end up with this:

Do the same thing to all eight pieces of paper. You should now have eight little strips of paper with corners folded down.

Take one folded piece and look closely at it. Notice how it almost has two little pockets. The top two layers of paper create the top pocket and the bottom two layers of paper create the bottom pocket.

You're going to insert the points of one of your little folded papers into these pockets. One point goes in the top pocket and the other point goes in the bottom pocket, like this:

Continue inserting each of your eight papers into the previous paper's pockets...

...until you've got all eight done. The final piece of folded paper will insert its points into the first piece you started with to create the finished wreath form.

That's it!

After I created a few wreaths in prep for craft day, I realized this little unassuming wreath had unlimited design possibilities. In the instructions above, I had you cut your strips of paper into 4cm x 8cm strips, but you could make almost any size by adjusting the measurements as long as you keep it 1 to 2. For example, to make a larger wreath I cut my paper to 4"x 8", wrapped it with 1" wide ribbon and ended up with this:

Then Brook made this gorgeous version with two different contrasting papers:

As you can see, the possibilities are endless: candle rings, ornaments, package decoration. You could string several together and create a garland. Don't think for a minute this is only good during the holidays. I used lots of colorful papers that would work any time of year. Brook even created one out of an old calendar I had with a drawing of lavender. Unfortunately, in all the excitement I forgot to photograph it. I hope you feel as inspired as we do about this project. We'd love to see what you create if you try this one yourself. Happy crafting.