After the strenuous coiled or root-woven tray from my last post, I was more than happy to try out this acorn box made from black newspaper tubes.

I have been trying out various acrylic colours which will completely blot out any print in my newspaper tubes. For the lighter colours, I have no choice but to use white or mostly-white tubes. Otherwise the print is very obviously visible and I just don't like it. As a consequence, I find that I am left out with a  lot of tubes that have newspaper print/coloured pictures on them.

One way to go is to use them as-is and weave my boxes with the print and pictures visible in the end product. I find that there are a lot of people who like this and I have had some orders where I have been specifically asked to use the newspaper tubes without any colours added.

On the other hand, I have also been experimenting with dark colours that I can use on these tubes, to hide the print, and the very best colour is, of course, black. Other than black, dark blue, prussian blue, deep red and dark green also work well.

So for my acorn box, I have used black tubes to form the base and the lid. The base was woven with a form, which was a plastic bowl of the required size. I tried out a 3-strand weaving, which I liked very much. The lid started off as a flat plate, with the edges turned down to convert into a lid. I added the little knob at the very end.

Model Details:

Model: Black Acorn Box

Difficulty Level: High Intermediate

Tutorial (making newspaper tubes): Youtube

Recently I had purchases some earring bases shaped like little bird cages, complete with birds too! So decided to use them to make some pretty origami earrings, with little stars in them.

Tried out a couple of colours and options and I must admit my favourite are the literary stars, made from the pages of an old book. Love the idea of recycling as well and these were so cute that they got sold out pretty fast!

The next option was using momigami paper. The crinkly texture of this paper adds an interesting dimension to the stars I thought. The royal blue earrings are made from this paper.

Finally I tried regular origami paper to make the brown stars. These stars blended well with the earring base. And once glazed, they had a nice shine to them too!

What do you think? Which are your favourites?