Paper Crafts: Origami

As someone whose hobby is handmade crafts, particularly scrapbooks, I’ve learned firsthand how expensive art supply stores can be. This should give you some good ideas for ways to save on art supplies while still maintaining your creative edge.

1. Now that big stash of periodicals that has been accumulating under your bed-frame can be put to quite a number of uses. Something I love to do is to use scissors to snip out various sized and colored letters and put them together to form words or sentences. To get a cool retro look just cut out letters from different ads, articles and the cover and mix them together.

If you have any old magazines laying around you may find ideas or pictures and graphic designs to make a collage or scrapbook. The pages from fashion spreads as the wallpaper for my scrapbooks, which I like. These universally possess strong themes, with hardly any (or no) writing. The nice thing about it is that if the image has any writing on it you don’t want you can always put a decoration over it or another picture.

Use Search Engines to find Graphics: This is a really good idea when scrap-booking. When starting a scrapbook you can search online for ideas and themes such as "It’s a Girl" or "Baby Girl" I was able to locate so many great things, and I really saved as well.

To get the terms related to the project you are doing, Search for different search engines images tool. You will discover a lot of information that applies to your projects and you can print it out. Copyright restrictions limit many items to personal use, so please use these graphics for non-business applications. If it is for your own personal use it should not be an issue.

Your local library can be a good, low cost way to print these out if you don’t have a printer of your own at home. You’ll save tons of money over buying designs and stickers from an art supply store.

Don’t worry if you don’t have any glue on hand you can always make some. Mix an equal amount of flour and water, depending on how much glue you need. Until it turns into a pasty substance keep mixing it.

Don’t make the glue until you are ready to use it because it will get moldy if left to sit. It is nice for paper projects but you should leave it out so it can dry totally following its use.

You can always add glitter to glue and then apply it like paint to decorate things.

D: Home made Modeling Clay provides a lot of cool crafts out there which call for some type of modeling clay. You can make this stuff on your own in the kitchen with things that you most likely already have at home, as opposed to buying it in a store. 1 cup flour, a tablespoon oil, 2 tablespoons cream of tarter, 1/2 cup salt and 1 cup water are used. Saute the combined ingredients in a large pan for a few minutes. It should be stored after cooling in a container that is airtight, kept in the fridge, until it is needed for use. If the container is not an air tight container you may lose your clay because it will dry up.

E: Look Around! There are supplies all around you! With scissors and markers, a pizza box can be cut up to make a big wall collage, dry pasta can be painted and glued on as a decoration paper plates can be masks.

Think openly about things around you. There are unlimited possibilities for crafts.

You will find a selection of nice low prices on barely used and new Paper Crafts: Origami: