 Tea-Bag
Folded Holiday Cards
by Kiki Clark
There comes a time in every craft columnist's career
when she starts typing odd words into Google just to see what's out
there. I entered tea bag and craft, and by golly, the
good people of
Holland had
something for me. Apparently it all started when
Tiny van der Plas
was sitting at her kitchen table having a cuppa and wondering how
she could make a fabulous handmade card for her sister. She looked
down at the brightly colored paper that had wrapped her teabag and
thought, "Ik niet het daadwerkelijke theezakje zal vouwen, zo waarom
ben I die roept het dit?" (Translation:
"I will not be folding the actual teabag, so why am I calling it
this?")
You might be thinking, "Hey, Kiki, December is kind
of late to start making home-made holiday cards." Well, these are
the kind of cards you give to only a few special people: your
immediate family, your religious services' provider if you have one,
maybe your plastic surgeon or the hunky pool boy. I don't make
judgments. The point is, there's love, and then there's
twenty-minutes-to-make-this-card love. But this craft is very pretty
and unique. Also, you can download designs off the Internet and
print out your own paper, thus saving yourself the cost of a trip to
Holland and a lot of suspicious questions from Customs ("Why so
much tea?").
Although this craft is sometimes called
"kaleidoscope origami," you won't see complicated instructions such
as, "Turn your triple mountain fold inside out, add a 45-degree
valley fold, and hang your head low." In teabag folding, you do the
same easy fold over and over and then slot the folded pieces
together to make the design. The results just look hard to
achieve.
First you need some paper with little colored
squares on it. Wrapping paper with a small design on it might work,
but you'd have to measure everything. I was far too lazy for that.
Here's the site I got my first design from:
http://members.fortunecity.com/zrosemarie1/. There are several
more sites with printable designs on the meta-listing site at the
bottom of this article.
For the above card (which was my very first try, so
you know it's easy), I printed out a 150 x 150-size design from
Rosemarie's collection. Then I used
these basic folding instructions.
There are other folding patterns, but this one
reminded me of those silly bird-beak things that fit on your fingers
and opened back and forth to tell you who would kiss you in
elementary school. If you made those, you can probably skip the
first folding step. If you find these squares a little small to fold
on a flat surface, just pick them up and fold them.
As for gluing: On the folding instructions, you'll
see someone putting a meticulous dot of some noxious-looking glue at
the very tips of the pieces. That looked way too hard. Instead, I
slotted the first two pieces together and looked at where they
overlapped. Then I took my
ZIG Memory System glue pen with the chisel tip and drew a line
of glue where I knew one paper piece would cover another. It's
remotely possible they don't stick up quite as much my way, but
I'm stuffing it all into a flat envelope, right?
Warning: I didn't find it difficult to manipulate
the last piece into place, but you can do it in such a way as to
leave a funny spot in the design if you're not paying attention. Do
the last join without the glue first, and stare at it real hard. If
both halves of your last triangle are showing, pull it forward or
back one more flap. You'll see what I mean.
All the designs I downloaded came bordered with
little black boxes. Some of these designs are so intricate that it
would be hard to tell where one design ends and the next begins. I
cut them on the long dimension on my
cutting mat, then cut the individual boxes off with scissors. I
stuck the folded designs to the card with the same glue I used
before. Keep your adhesive in a smallish circle toward the center,
to get the best 3-D effect.
I made two snowflake deely-bobs out of the one sheet
I printed. There were more squares left, so I cut them into
triangles, overlapped them haphazardly on the bottom of the card
like fallen snow, and cut the excess off. Then I broke out the
rhinestones
- because I could. I was resigned to using a hot-glue gun, even
though I string glue so badly it looks like my project has been
decorated by leaky spiders. Luckily, I spotted my adhesive
Mini Pop Dots, so I used them to glom the stones on. Whew. The
inside of this card might read, "I'm dreaming of a colorful
Christmas with rhinestones, because I look bad in white." If you
send something with hard bits through the mail, remember to write
"Hand Cancel!" along the bottom of the envelope, front and back. And
you know you can get blank
cards and envelopes at craft stores, right? Here's one with
glitter on the tips.
This was an interesting design because it wasn't
quite symmetrical, so I had to pooch the last fold a certain way to
get the right side up. I doubt you'd ever have that issue on paper
you bought for the purpose.
And here's a beautiful card with a heartbreaking
flaw.
Those bits of beaded thread were recycled from
another project that I dropped and broke. When I found them, I was
so excited that I forgot to check that I had the good side of the
medallion face up. See how the center design doesn't quite match up?
The other side was perfect. Perfect! I didn't discover my
error until I started photographing, and by then there was too much
adhesive involved to go back. Learn from my mistakes, kids, and
double check that puppy before you glue it to anything else. (sniff)
So there you
have it: Tea-bag folding from our clever Dutch friends. My net
surfing showed me that you can do even spiffier stuff with different
folds. I love getting things off the Internet for free, but if I
decide to do more with this, I'll probably buy a book. It would be
nice to have the instructions build to more complicated projects
instead of getting information piecemeal off the Web. The
best-looking site I saw for getting everything you need is
Stamporium.
Make sure
you check out the
3-D gallery. These people are really into tea-bag folding.
And finally, here's a meta-listing site, to satisfy
your lust for knowledge and give you more pretty printables:
http://www.craftsitedirectory.com/teabagfolding/
Next Month: Gaw-geous glass tag pendants!
back to the top
Christmas
Treats
By
Merrillee Whren
Christmas is my favorite time of year. It's a time
for giving and sharing. I'm going to share a couple of my favorite
Christmas treats with you. The first recipe came from my grandmother
who cooked over a wood stove, thus the phrase, "take from the fire."
My mother passed this recipe down to me, and I have passed it down
to my daughters.
CHOCOLATE NUT CARAMELS
Ingredients:
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups
white corn syrup
2 cups cream
3 squares
bitter chocolate
1 1/2 cups
chopped walnuts
1 cup butter
(not margarine)
2 teaspoons
vanilla
Directions: Put sugar, syrup, butter and one cup
cream in a kettle and bring to a boil. When it is boiling briskly,
add the other cup of cream a little at a time so mixture keeps
boiling. Boil until a thread of the mixture is brittle in cold
water. Take from the fire and add chocolate pieces and nuts. Beat
until chocolate is all melted. Stir in vanilla. Pour into a shallow,
buttered pan to cool. After cooling, remove from pan and cut into
one-inch squares.
This second recipe came from my husband's side of
the family. He makes this special nut roll every year. The recipe
came from his father's Slavic family.
ROZAK
Ingredients:
Filling:
1 pound
light brown sugar
1/4 cup
flour
1 large can
evaporated milk
1 stick
butter
1 teaspoon
maple flavor
4 cups
finely chopped walnuts
1/2 cup
coconut
1 tablespoon
cinnamon
Mix sugar, flour, milk and butter and cook until
slightly thickened, about 10 minutes. Fold in remainder of
ingredients. Let mixture cool slightly before spreading on the
rolled-out dough.
Make hot roll mix or use dairy case bread dough.
Roll out dough on floured board in shape of a rectangle
approximately 14 by 10 inches. (Dough will be about 1/4 inch thick.)
Spread filling over dough and roll up like a jellyroll. Pinch ends
to hold filling. Place on a cookie sheet (two per sheet) with
greased aluminum foil strips between loaves to keep them from
running into each other. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes or
until golden brown. Brush with melted butter as soon as removed from
the oven.
To read last
month's Stuff to Make article, click
here
back to the top |
