I love making origami earrings, especially since Little Miss is at an age where she appreciates and wears them! So recently I managed to dig out some of the earrings that I had made in the past and put them together so that she could use them as and when she wanted to. 

Her absolute favourite was the one made from red/gold chiyogami paper. This paper is amazing to make origami jewelry from - it has that rich look to it that adds so much elegance to the product. A couple of dangles and fish hooks completed this beautiful pair!

 

These pink earrings were folded from pearlised momogami paper. A couple of artificial pearls and the earring was ready to be worn. 

 

The final set that she liked was this black set made from black/gold chiyogami paper. I added some gold chains to the earrings and I thought it went well with the look and feel of this pair.

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

This origami star, designed by Enrica Dray, is a modular star made from 8 modules. It is really simple to fold and beautiful and elegant when completed. The star has a slight 3-D effect, since the top layer does not lie flat against the lower layer. The back of the star (Second pic), I thought, was as beautiful as the front!

2 contrasting colours work best for this model. Since I have a very bad eye for colour selection, I used the net to find out 2-colour combinations and liked the black-beige yellow the best. Origami 60 gsm paper, 3 inch squares, 4 of black and 4 of beige yellow, resulted in a star about 4 inches across.

Previously, I have folded the Mina Kusudama, also designed by Enrica Dray. Like the star, the mina kusudama was also easy to fold and assemble. It is of course, made from 30 modules, so it is more time-consuming than the star, but equally satisfying to work on.

Model Details:

Model: Star 

Creator: Enrica Dray

Difficulty Level: Low Intermediate

Paper Ratio: Square

Paper Size: 3 inch squares

Model Size: ~4 inches across

Modules: 8

Tutorial: Youtube