Exclusive Gold/Silver Origami Cases

And it is (or rather, was) chrismastime again. And what do people like us do that time of the year? Right, tinkering together gifts in raw quantities! This time it got to be small origami figures, plated with real leaf-gold and leaf-silver: A nice selfmade gift with a exclusive note to it. And this is a small introduction (i wouldn’t say tutorial for the sake of the posts detail level) on how to make them. Read on!

Okay, so first you might ask yourself what you need to build those? It’s rather simple, only two things really. Of course the leaf-gold or leaf-silver, the special “transfer” version which sticks a little to one piece of parchment paper and thus can be touched, moved, etc … very handy. We recommend starting with the silver as it’s cheaper for learning and experimenting. You might find it in a nerby art-supply store (boesner.com if you live in the right place :P) – if that was a false shot, maybe try asking in shops that build picture-frames and frame your pictures – if it’s a shop that crafts the frames themselves they might have some and sell it to you.

The next thing is spray-mount, use 3M permanent spraymount for example. We didn’t use the traditional method with that special gold-milk (a strange kind of watery wood-glue thing) as it was hard to get it evenly distributed on thin paper (parchment paper) without making the paper crinkle … that’s where those spraymounts come in handy.

And thats really about it – we used the parchement paper which lies in the package of gold/silver between as a seperator, it worked perfect. So no extra paper too! 🙂

Okay, now on to the crafting:

The package of transfer-leaf-gold
Now take on sheet of the parchment paper seperators of the gold/silver package and coat it evenly from ~20-30 cm distance with the spraymount
place the sticky spraymount-coated parchment paper on a table, take the sheet of transfer-silver/gold and slowly lower it above the sticky paper onto it. Once it touched the surface only lower it further, never raise it again, the gold/silver will tear ...
then after a few seconds (10-20) you can pull the transfer-paper off - the gold/silver remains on the parchment paper we coated with spraymount ... still shiny and smooth, almost no crinkles!
and then ... do your usual origami!

Yes, it’s true – we this is a small kind of tutorial, but the spraymount / slow lowering technique really took its time to find out. We first tried with that gold-milk, was a no-go. The silver was full of crinkles as the thin paper crinkled (the milk is kinda watery as i said…), so this didn’t look nice.  Also all experiments with those kinds of materials tend to be expensive :).

What is also missing is a description of the origami done, but this is a whole different story that’s better describe on other sites … our tip: try youtube videos, they’re much more comprehensive than those image-kind of instructions … they tend to get very confusing.

So, what did we do with this? Using the glass-cutting technique described in a earlier post we build some boxes and … wai – here are the results:

Hope you found this idea inspiring and … it’s not that hard, try yourself! Get Creative!

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