A Marvelous Mess and a Chinese New Year Paper Craft!

Welcome to the party!

Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year to a lot of other Asian countries) is on January 31st! I made a craft to help celebrate it:

It is the symbol for spring in Chinese. 

Want to see how to make it?

1. Take a piece of red paper, square sized. Fold it in half vertically, horizontally, and then diagonally both ways. 

2. You should be able to get four definable corners by pushing the valleys of the vertical and horizontal folds inwards. 

3. Gather all four corners into one triangle shape.

4. Sketch this design on it and cut out all the place where it is dark. 

5. It should look like this! 

6. Use glue to keep the pieces together.

7. Take some scraps of red paper and make a fringe, then roll it tightly up.

8. Glue the fringe on the tops and sides to make it stay.

9. Use a gold string (or a red one) and hot glue it to the top of the fringe and to the bottom of the paper cut out, where the box meets together in the center. Find some red string and glue it to the top of the craft so that you can place it somewhere as a decoration!

I found some pictures for this craft, with no real directions, at this site. 

I shared this post at the following parties:
Between Naps On The Porch

What have you all been up to? 

Here was my fave from last week:

Chocolate Fondant Cookies from KiddieFoodies....

some seriously big yum for those right now. 

Now on to the party!

A Marvelous Mess

One of the coolest crafts I've seen in a while was linked up last week:

How to Make Your Own Ice Luminaries from One Little Project. This is SUCH a fun idea. I am definitely going to try it. I think I'm going to give it a little twist too...last year I did these same water balloon ice globes with different food coloring in them. I bet some lightly colored ones would be fun!

Now on to the party:

Make Your Own Window Screen

We happen to live right on the main road and our bedroom looks out over a parking lot. Makes for a lot of closed curtains, even during the day! Which means a lot less light. That is something I just can't tolerate... especially this time of year. So, I had read somewhere (years ago) of a way to make opaque window screens with contact paper and window cleaner.

See what I mean? Not enough light. 

Add a screen...

I was lucky enough to find some contact paper that had some scalloped texture to it, but was still clear. 

So, here's how you do it.

You need: 

Window Cleaner

Contact Paper 

Credit Card

~Take your contact paper and (before peeling off the backing) measure it to fit the window. 

~Spray the window with a lot of cleaner; really soak it. 

~Immediately place the paper, sticky side first, onto the window and slide it into place.

~Use a credit card to smooth out the bubbles in the paper. 

There you go!

This removes easily, even after months of being there!

Ooooo.....also wanted to tell you that I've got a new Valentine in my etsy shop:

It's a Harp Seal holding a heart. 

You've gotta go see him! 

I shared this post at the following linky parties:

The Weekly Creative

Link Party Palooza