Heart Balloons Card

Bonjour,

This week has been seriously long! It just feels like it's been dragging along, and even now, I can hardly keep my eyes open as I'm typing.

This card is cute for birthdays, Valentines or even Mother's Day (hint, hint, it's tomorrow if you're from the UK). It can be used for any age group, but is probably more suited to girls. Instead of the heart shaped balloons, however, regular round, wavy or oval balloons could be cut and used to make the card more fitting to a wider audience.

To start out, I'm using plain white card, but you could use any colour and thickness for this. Using a darker colour and white, cream or pastel coloured balloons would look pretty cool. I'm just using half an A4 piece for this, but any size would work, you would just need to either alter the size of the balloons or how many there are.

To cut out the balloons, I cut out small squares of coloured paper and folded them in half, before drawing half a heart shape and cutting it out to get an even shape. I have one of each colour, but if you're going for a specific colour theme, then use the best colours to fit your design. To finish off the card, glue the balloons in a shape of your choice and add some string or embroidery thread to make the balloon strings.

The card's actual look is down to you, whether you want just one balloon or multiple in a cluster. I hope you have someone to give this card too, and can try to make it yourself.
 

Don't forget to guess this week's language, either comment or tweet me @_littleblog. Last week's was Spanish. The lovely ladies, Hager from bmobshelldrawer.wordpress.com and Mel from www.melberryy.com guessed it right, so well done girls! And thank you for guessing!

I hope you guys have a lovely week!

Love, Grace x

Origami Lucky stars

Hey guys, 

Sorry this post is a little later today, this morning was a little too busy to have a chance to post this!

Origami lucky stars. It's completely your choice as to whether or not you believe in the 'lucky' side of the name but they are pretty sweet anyway. I'm planning to fill a jar up with multi-coloured ones and have it as a decoration (a picture will be up on Instagram soon) but I also had another idea for them. You could write a 'wish' or just something good that happened, fold it up and then put it in a jar or somewhere special. No-one else has to know what is inside it and it can be a way of making wishes that are your own little secret stars!

First up, you will need a regular sheet of paper (8 by 16 inches I think). You can have this in any colours you like to make the little stars extra special! The next bit to do is the measurement for the strips. Each strip needs to be the length of the paper but 1/2 an inch across. I'm not sure if it would work with other thicknesses but it's definitely worth a try!

The first step is to create a knot in the strip. You may be thinking 'what?' at this point! Its not a knot like one you would see in a string but the concept is the same. You need to make a loop in the paper and then push the end through the loop.

There should be a small length left over but you can just tuck this under one of the flaps, a small-ish pentagon should be left. With the length of paper that is sticking out you need to wrap it around the pentagon. As the sides are angled it will direct the paper to be wrapped around each side in turn. the wrapping needs to be close to the sides but not so much that it overlaps.

Once you don't have enough paper left to do another wrap you need to tuck the remaining length in under the wraps on the side that would have housed the next wrap. There should be a 'v' shape where you can tuck the end in ( you may have to trim it if it is slightly too long).

The last step is to inflate the star. With your thumbs and forefingers you need to gently press on the sides of the pentagon until it begins to inflate. you can adjust it to the specific shape you want and voila! A super cute origami lucky star! 

I really love these stars and have been waiting to share them with you guys! I hope you like them and the instructions aren't too confusing!

Until next time

Grace

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