Transforming paper plates

There's a few posts I really must write but I keep pushing them back, they're a bit serious and quite emotional and I'm finding it difficult to word what I want to say. So in the meantime, I thought I'd show you what I made at my last WI meeting.

My parents were visiting from Belgium this week so I took my mum along. The challenge was to turn paper plates into flowers. After about an hour of tracing, cutting and gluing, here's what we came up with:

My offering

My mum's offering

It was good fun and it was really interesting to see how different everyone's flowers were.

Post-it heart

My first ever craft love was origamis. So with Valentine's day on our doorstep, I thought I'd teach you one of my favourite little folded wonders: Post-it hearts.

To make a heart, you'll need a 38mm x 51mm Post-it in the colour of your choice. For demonstration purposes only, the tutorial below uses larger Post-its that I cut down the side to get to the right proportions. It's not easier to use larger Post-its, it just photographes better!

So here's how you do it in 10 easy steps:

1. make sure the sticky strip on the Post-it is facing you and is at the bottom

2. Fold the Post-it along the midline then unfold it, use the fold as guidance in the next two steps

3. Fold the bottom corners using the fold line as a marker

4. Snip on the fold in the top making sure you stop where those corners meet up

5. Fold the inner corners in

6. Fold the top edges so they meet the edges of the folded up bottom corners

7. Fold the outer edges in as demonstrated

8. Fold the top corners in and press the fold so it stays in place

9. Fold the bottom corners back out so that the sticky edge shows

10. Turn over your heart and stick, you're done!

The key to successful origamis is precision and making sure you press each and every fold neatly so they stay in place.

Now make a load of those and make sure you let that someone special know how you feel about them!