DIY: Stash Bust: Pacman Paper Lantern

Today I decided to try out the Paper Lantern Ornament tutorial by The Creative Place. I suggest you follow the excellent tutorial to make them yourselves. They’re easy to make (if you don’t mind fiddling around a bit, that is) and make a wonderful decoration for a table and you can use stuff you have lying around at home, which makes it the perfect project for the April Stash Bust.

At first I went traditional and decided to cut up old, yellow pages from a book my Mom gave me. The paper is really thin, which made it rather fiddly to work with.

 
But I was quite pleased with the result:

The way it sat there, it almost reminded me of a pumpkin. They’d be cute to make in orange paper for Halloween. Use a green brad for the stem, paint on a face and you’d have the perfect decoration for a Halloween party. So this got me thinking about other shapes.

I grabbed some scraps of yellow paper. If you only have a regular hole punch like I do and can’t fit all of your strips into it at once, here’s a quick tip. Punch the first half of your strips, then gather all of them together and mark the center of the hole on the unpunched half. If you remove the bottom of your hole punch you can turn it upside down, insert the second half of the strips and position them with the mark you made to ensure the holes will match up.

I used only 13 strips for this lantern, but did the rest according to the tutorial. And what do you end up with?

It’s a pacman! I colored and cut out some white paper to make the eyes. Attach them with glue dots and you’re done. If you want you can cut out some yellow dots for your little pacman to eat as well.

DIY: Bunny Straws & 1st blog giveaway

As promised yesterday, I’m back with the tutorial for the cute bunny straws. They’re the perfect addition for any easter table. You can use them as straws, glue them onto placecards or simply sprinkle them over the table. And the best thing about them? They’re quick and easy to make.

If you’d like to find out how you can get the chance to win a special easter surprise, I suggest you hop on down.

First off, gather your supplies. You will need:

• sheets of colored paper
• scissors
• x-acto knife and cutting mat
• the bunny template (A4 pdf) (US letter pdf)
• black marker
• glue stick (optional)
• straws (optional)

1. Print out the template onto your colored paper. The more colors, the more fun (and the more bunnies)! I’ve provided pdfs with 6 big and 12 small bunnies both for A4 and US letter sizes. If you want them a different size, simply grab the bunny on the right and print in desired size.
2. Grab your scissors and cut out all those bunnies and eggs. For a more finished look, draw around the cut edges with a black marker. Then lay out the bunnies and give each a differently colored egg.

3. We’re ready for the arms. Get your x-acto knife and grab a bunny. Place the egg above the bunny and mark the four places where you have to cut. (See the red darts.) I usually just poke the bunny with the tip of my x-acto knife.

4. Cut along the arms from where you’ve marked your bunny.

5. Now wiggle the egg under the arms and you’re done with the basic steps. This is what your bunny should look like now:

If you don’t want to use the bunny for the straws, you’re done now. Go let your bunnies hop around. You might want to glue down the egg with your glue stick. I found that mine hold their eggs quite well, so I skipped that step.

6. To pass the straw through the bunny, make two horizontal slits about 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) long as shown.

7.Now gently slide the straw through the two slits. You might want to press the bottom of the straw flat to make it pass through a little easier.

8. To hide the hole in the bunny, wiggle the egg under the arms in front of the straw. And you’re done!

You can even have fun customizing the bunnies. I made my boy a special debian geek bunny:

Now on to the giveaway. I’ll be sending one reader a special easter surprise. Who doesn’t love surprises? To enter, all you have to do is tell me your favourite holiday in the comments to this post. Entries end March 31st, 23:59. The winner will be chosen randomly and announced on Thursday. Make sure you leave your e-mail so I can contact you.

The giveaway is now closed. Thanks everybody for participating!

Bunny Straws

I’ve got an exam tomorrow, so what better way to spend the day than finally updating my new blog with my first project? The idea for these little bunnies has hopped into my head two days ago and I just couldn’t rest until I had these little buggers finished. Here’s a little sneak peek. What do you think?

I’ll write-up and post the tutorial including templates tomorrow when I’ll also be hosting my first blog giveaway. So stay tuned!