Wrapping Paper Origami

Big Brother is in a phase where he loves paper folding crafts - paper airplanes, origami, and more. He got both an origami and a paper airplane kit from different relatives over the holiday weekend. He's been excited to dig into both - and while each kit came with paper, it won't be long until we run out.

Luckily I quickly realized that we have lots of colorful paper still on hand - used wrapping paper!

I always feel a little sad about how quickly the wrapping paper is unwrapped and then discarded by the kiddos on Christmas morning. And while I try to save some of the bigger pieces for another year, two eager unwrapping kiddos can make that tricky. Which means it's always great to find some easy crafts for the used paper instead. 

In this case, I cut 6 inch by 6 inch papers out of as many smooth sections of paper as I could find. I used my paper cutter to even out the edges, but scissors would work too. 

We then used the directions from Big Brother's Origami kit to create different creatures. His kit contains directions for several different basic animals - a cat, a snake, a fish, a bunny, etc. 

We each made a couple of different animals and used a black pen to add details. We tried using several of the different papers and found they all worked great! 

We still have several papers left over to experiment with. With a little ribbon these creatures could easily become decorations for our tree next year, or even decorations on packages. Once we've mastered the simple animals in the directions, we'll be ready to try some other, harder designs too. 

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