O is for Origami #AtoZchallenge

Hello and welcome to my blog! For the month of April I will be blogging from A to Z, my theme, scrapbooking.

Today’s letter is a fun one – O is for Origami.

Origami is the art of paper folding. Although origami is primarily used for ornaments and crafts, the shapes bridge nicely to scrapbooking, adding an interactive and dimensional element to your page.

When I was growing up, we had friends give origami Christmas ornaments for our tree.

This last year I imitated the sentiment by creating a star tree-topper, and a Blue Heron ornament.

I enjoyed the craft so much that I thought about ways to apply the art to my scrapbook albums.

One way I dabbled with paper folding was with this origami heart.

This heart is just a prototype for practice, I will later create a cream-colored heart that goes with the Valentine’s theme, but I loved how the folds created a hidden pocket.

This would make a great area of hidden journaling, or an “open to view” secret admirer message.

I gave you a preview of this second example back in the D is for Die Cuts post.

This is slated to be my Thanksgiving 2017 page, which includes a 3-D dinner spread.

I stamped each of the place settings, and created an origami “napkin” for each.

The napkin is a small square of coordinating paper that I folded into a triangular shape.

My goal to bring the “napkins” to Thanksgiving dinner and ask each of my loved ones to write down things they are thankful for this year.

Once I’ve collected the squares, I will glue the napkins into place on top of each plate, where the message will be hidden until opened.

I think the pop-up element is so cool, and the idea came from the study of origami.

Well that covers another letter – I thank you for checking out my post. Please leave a comment if you would like, and if you'd like to read more A-Z topics, please search the keywords #AtoZChallenge or @AprilA2Z.

And I hope you'll come tomorrow for more scrapbooking how-to – P is for Punches & Paper.

See you then!

-         SNG