Five Acres with a View

Paper Dolls by C. David Claudon has paper dolls for adults. Print them out on your color computer and start cutting.

Matthew Toledo provides instructions on How to Make an Origami CD Case.

When I was a kid, I used to fold this ring out of one dollar bills. This Money Origami Site has a lot of other tutorials as well.

I carved this crow image based on the photo I took a few weeks ago. I used The Gimp to turn the photo into an image I could carve. I’ve always wanted a turn-photo-into-soft-block-carving filter, and the new photocopy filter provided with Gimp 2.2 comes close.

Click photo for higher resolution

Scrapbook Quilts was the workshop topic for my stamp club this month. The woman who organized it is a fabulous quilter and scrapbooker. Since I don’t scrapbook and don’t quilt, I felt somewhat intimidated by the topic, but decided I could always watch the others work. (The organizer’s reassurance that it was just collage on fabric didn’t help either, since I don’t do collage very well.)

Instead of using small quilts, the organizer provided a selection of quilted fabric placemats that she had bought at department clearance sales. I picked the plainest one I could find, and started pushing Sizzix die cuts around on it. Everyone had brought lots of different items to embellish the quilts and we were all pawing through each others’ stuff to see if we could find anything that would help our own quilt. The buttons at the top of mine came from one woman’s stash, and the Scrabble tiles came from the stash of the organizer, who buys every Scrabble set she finds at thrift stores and garage sales. I didn’t finish mine at the meeting because I had a photo at home that I wanted to use, but most members did complete their quilts.

I know it doesn’t look completely square in the photograph, and I finally discovered after attempts to make it square, that it didn’t start square. The quilting seems to have warped the place mat slightly.

Although this isn’t my usual style, it was nice to do something different for a change.

Beate Johns has written a good tutorial on how to make Faux Postage at Splitcoaststampers. Faux Postage is designed to look like official postage, but should not be used for that purpose.

Yahoo! has apparently not forgotten about YahooGroups, and the site has been redesigned. See the new look at SceneStampers and SaraL.

The Duct Tape Guys have directions for making useful, and not so useful, items with duct tape, including a wallet.

For Christmas, a friend gave me a page a day calendar featuring origami models. (It is actually five models a week, but who is counting?) One day page mentioned the OrigamiUSA site as a resource.

Else’s Bellas Artes shows some artistamps on her weblog. Click on the scan for a higher resolution view.