Happy Chinese New Year!

It's the year of the Dog! What better way to celebrate than with a few paper crafts? (China, after all, was where paper was first created.) 

These pictures are from a few years back when I visited Hong Kong, but I never ended up posting them. This very simple red envelope lantern was quick to make and looked very festive when strung up next to the window. 

One of my aunts works for a bank and each year, they give out packets of red envelopes for free. She gave me stacks of the extras for my crafting.

I kept things basic. I folded in the four corners of each envelope and then I stapled five envelopes together at their corners. 

You end up with a flower module. I made two of these to form the ends. 

Connecting the two ends was a bit tricky. Some of the vertices ended up have only 3 envelopes meeting. 

Here's half of the lantern. 

When completely assembled, it looks like this. A bit more tubular than I had envisioned but the gold and red are very eye catching. 

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Actually, it’s tomorrow but it is never too early to show off some Chinese New Year themed crafts!

2014 is the year of the horse:

I got the pattern from here. Sorry, not an original creation. : P

A search on google was very sparse in terms of good crafts. Most of the results were geared towards kids and were either a simple Chinese lantern or some form of a dragon craft painted red. Therefore, I decided to look back at traditional Chinese handicrafts.  Unfortunately, I did not have the materials for most of them (I say this as if having bamboo sticks, silk screens, or embroidered cloth would make up for my lack of skill). The one that I could do though was the paper cutting. There are some beautifully elaborate patterns out there but since I was also watching TV at the time I was making these, I decided to not risk my fingers with something too challenging.

All these patterns are variations on templates I found on the internet. 

They are all very simple but I think they are still cute. 

Next year, I plan on making many, many more to hang around my house.

Dimensions: varies

Materials:  Red gift wrapping paper, red thread, tape

Tools: scissors, pencil

Time to Make: 2 hours

Cutting out these designs really brought home to me that an artist is sometimes only as good as her tools. My scissors were not the double sharpened, needle tipped scissors that Chinese artists traditionally used and I found that limited how finely I could cut my lines without ripping them. Clearly, I need to do more shopping if I want to take this art further. ; D