DIY Upcycled Bookmarks

 

This week I had an absolute blast making a bunch of bookmarks from scrap paper and a really old melways I discovered hiding in my car when it was written off earlier this year. I hunted around online for some inspiration and in the end made 3 different types of bookmarks:

– one from a spine label of a book

– one using text from The Hunger Games

– 0ne using the Melways paired with a favourite quote of mine.

I’ve made some quick tutorials for anyone else wanting to make the same. For the bookmark template, just google around online until you find one that you like. These bookmarks are all pretty basic so changing the template won’t ruin it.

After making the above three I admittedly did get a bit carried away and made a few more quote bookmarks. I think they look pretty cool though:

 

Have you made any awesome DIY bookmarks from old paper or old books? I’d love to hear about it if you have, leave me a message in the comments section.

3D Hand Drawing

I’m currently developing a monthly craft program to run in libraries and thought a session on 3D drawing would be fun. But before pitching that idea, I needed to test it out and see how difficult it was. As someone who doesn’t do virtually any drawing… I wasn’t overly optimistic about the project. But as you can see below, it turned out to be remarkably simple and look pretty cool.

3D Hand Drawing Tutorial:

Step one: Using a pencil, draw an outline around your hand.

 

Step two: Use a ruler and a black marker or pen to rule straight lines up to the edge of your hand outline on both sides. Inside the outline of your hand, use the pen or marker to make a curved/slightly raised line as shown. Continue until you’ve covered the entire piece of paper. Curving around the tips of your fingers can be difficult so I recommend drawing the curves for them first and then placing the horizontal lines outside of them afterwards.

 

 

Step three: Start drawing coloured lines underneath the black marker lines. You can use as many or as few colours as you like, or you can even just stick to black and white. This step can take an AGE or if you’re less pedantic than me, you can complete this in around 30mins to an hour.

 

 

Step four: Step back and look at your completed 3D drawing! If done correctly it should look like the hand is popping out of the page.

 

Here are some other awesome ones that other people around the internet have done:

   Bright by “Speed Skating Mum”

A more relaxed version by “Creative Eye Candy”

Highlighter version by “Made with Love”

This technique can be used to make anything look 3D. From a drawing of a spatula to the alphabet. The part around the thumb is absolutely the hardest (of a very easy project) so remember to keep an eye on it as you add lines. This is a really fun project that looks a lot harder than what it actually is. My recommendation? Give it a go!

 

Upcycling toilet paper rolls

I’ve been pretty strapped for time since starting work full time so this week is going to be a relatively short and sweet post. Pictured above is something I made years ago from old toilet paper rolls we had accumulated. It was fairly simply to make –

Step one:

Flatten out the toilet paper roll and use duct tape to secure one end completely closed.

Step two:

Cut out a piece of magazine paper to fit around the entire toilet paper roll.

Step three:

Glue magazine paper to toilet roll – ensuring it is tight inside the top and around the bottom and leave to dry overnight.

Step four:

Repeat as many times as you like until you’ve got the amount you want!

I told you it was easy! The fun part is choosing all the different magazine pages to use. I lucked out and found some awesome artworks in the magazines I was looking through and they ended up making really awesome little covers.

I’m not entirely sure what I’ll end up using these for – right now they’re just hanging around as decoration. But there are a LOT of options – gift wrapping, storing things like bobby pins and lib balm in my handbag so I don’t lose them, portable tissue holders etc. Let me know if you make any and what you use them for : )

Spirograph Art

Last year I re-discovered a favourite childhood toy – the Spirograph! Back when I was a kid I knew it only as ‘that cool thing that make awesome circles’, but now I have a much greater appreciation for it! The Spirograph allows you to make a seemingly endless variety of intricate designs for extremely little effort.

So far I’ve used it to make cards, decorate wrapping paper and what I’m about to show you below: wall art.

For about 3 months last year I made little spirograph designs almost daily and spent a good twenty minutes a day colouring them in. It doesn’t sound like a tedious process but the Spirograph circles can be extremely detailed so some of the little designs took me over a week to colour in.

In any case this is what I ended up doing with them:

I ran out of designs to fill up my final frame so I tried putting a piece of decorative paper in the frame as the background. I’m not thrilled with the effect so I’m going to have to make a few more designs to fill it up like the others. The one thing I do like about the final frame is that I can see the entirety of each little design rather than only a portion. Lot’s of decisions to be made regarding this one…

Paper Face Collage

Today’s craft dose is a bit more random than normal… I had a whole stack of paper magazines to recycle (way more than I could ever hope to use) and decided to see if I could make a face using skin care/eye makeup advertisements that are so repetitive in women’s fashion magazines. I used two magazines that had already had heaps of pages ripped out or cut up for other crafts and left the rest in a stack to give away on Gumtree.

There isn’t much to say about the process, I just cut random blobs out from various faces and then lay them together until a face emerged.

Here is the result:

I was quite happy with the way it came out but realised I couldn’t do anything with it because I, rather stupidly, didn’t think to put paper down before laying it out on the carpet. Normally with something like this where there are so many tiny pieces and placing is critical for maintaining the image, I would have carefully weighted it down and painted it over with a clear resin to preserve it. But, not willing to risk ruining the carpet, I just took a heap of photos then swept it up and into the bin.

It was a fun activity and it only took about half an hour so it’s definitely something I might look into doing for wall art when Farris and I get our own home. There’s so many images you could create – not just faces – and I’m tempted to try to replicate a favourite photo or art piece.

I was particularly happy with the way the hair worked out framing her face, as well as the lips. They were particularly difficult but ended up being quite distinct. See below for a close up.

 

Anyway that’s all I really got up to this week. Have you seen any awesome examples of paper collage? Or have you created something similar? I’d love to see so please share!