what we have here is a failure to communicate

So NEXT year, when you want to make Halloweenie decor out of scraps of paper, refer to this post (as I accidentally tripped and kicked “the ball” into a dusty corner where it lay forgotten until now…)

I had fun on Halloween, between entertaining friends and giving out candy to appropriately cute rug-rats, folding some spooky origami. Thusly:

I folded quite a few bats, but this one was the most complex. I found the directions through a favorite crafty blog that I’ve mentioned here before – How About Orange. Her bat came out closer to the original, designed by Protogenius. At a certain point (possibly due to my consumption of several autumnal beers) I got lost and just fudged the rest. Here are some far simpler bats:

Oh, and my one lonely pumpkin. Directions for the bats can be found here, and for the pumpkin here. That skelital hand you see was my masterpiece of the evening. It was designed by Jeremy Shafer, and I followed this video, with surprisingly good results.

I had also found a book at my local library written by a Pittsburgh native who has been folding paper since he was 3 years old. Scott Wasserman Stern started writing Outside the Box Origami when he was 14, and his enthusiastic Introduction put a big smile on my face. His simple skull model (seen above) was fun to make, and although I couldn’t produce his fantastic ghost model that night, I did make a pretty nice elephant a few days later.

It now lives on the mantel, along with a few paper flowers that I folded using directions from Origami Flowers by Soonboke Smith.

A different sort of paper craft was called for as the first few days of November rolled by. One of the pleasures of moving to a new place is exploring a new library and finding nifty books to draw inspiration from. Mexican Papercutting by Kathleen Trenchard found its way to me just in time for Day of the Dead, and I enjoyed learning about the history and practice of papel picado, and of course had to grab some tiny scissors and try my hand at a design.

I cut this out of a square of origami paper, instead of a stack of tissue paper (as is traditional), and used scissors and not (as I was fascinated to learn) a large selection of chisels and a hammer. However, having spent much of the year with a timberframing chisel in my hands, it seems like a natural progression to combine an old passion with this new one and learn how to cut paper with one…!

In the last few days I’ve turned from paper to fabric and have picked up some sewing (clothing related) and started dreaming of making a quilt. As the temperatures dip round here and the first snow falls (yesterday!) I am happy to embrace cozy projects and cups of tea and episodes of Deadwood.

My recent (at last!) foray into the world of The Game of Thrones has also inspired me to brush up on European history, so I think the coming months will find me engrosed in some hefty, dusty tomes. Any suggestions?

What are your winter plots and passions?

View from my bathroom window yesterday