Origami Sharing

An Origami Mobile

Last month, our group of 8- to 10-year-old girls completed an origami activity. During one meeting, we made four origami creations using origami paper from Japan and a guidebook with diagrams. At the next meeting, we constructed the framework for our mobile using little wooden dowels and some colorful yarn (tied the yarn around the middle of both dowels, and then wound it around the plus-shaped dowel formation to make a diamond design, then knotted the yarn). We taped a thread from each origami shape to the wooden dowel ends to hang our shapes, and then put two sticky-backed glow-in-the-dark foam stars (Walmart) at the end of each dowel so that they were enclosing the end of the dowel between them. The girls could hang their mobiles in their bedrooms from the ceiling and enjoy!  (Mesa, AZ)

An Origami Bouquet Gift

We had such fun learning origami! My eldest son, the origami expert, taught the rest of us to do folds and make various objects. It was fun to see them take shape and become little birds and windmills and other things. When we were done we had dozens of figures and it seemed a shame not to do something with them. So I bought some green straws and we glued the figures to one end then stuck the other end into a piece of floral foam in the bottom of a small basket. It made an origami bouquet! We sent it to a small friend who'd been in the hospital for a few days, and she loved it. Best thing about it was that it didn't die a week later, and it is still as lovely as ever!  (Argyle, NY)