F-light of Cranes

Colorful origami cranes suspended from a lit-up wooden bark - to bring us eternal good luck! 

Origami as an art is so creatively versatile. With mere paper such awesome figures can be made. I have always been fascinated by it. So in our next project we tried to put our origami skills to test.

We decided to make origami cranes. As per Japanese legend it is said that anyone who folds a 1000 origami cranes, will be granted eternal good luck. Fascinating! So in our pursuit for good luck we started folding square papers to make our 1000 cranes. We used different colored sheets to make our flock of cranes look as colorful as possible.

To make our origami cranes, we took tutorials from YouTube: it has become such a universal teacher I say. The crane is pretty simple to make – just a few folds here and a few folds there and your paper-folded crane is ready!

After our colorful cranes were ready, we wanted to place them in such a way as if they were in flight. So we hanged each crane from a thick wooden bark with a transparent plastic wire, all at varying heights.

To make the entire look more dramatic, we wound light-streamers to the wooden bark.

In the day the colors of the flying cranes looks so vibrant & joyous and by night with the lights turned on, the shadows of the cranes peacefully dance away.

Though we did not end up making 1000 cranes, but we still hope that the eternal good luck still comes our way! Amen.

Origami made paper objects can be used very widely to enhance our home décor. They are quick to make, inexpensive and give or homes a creative flair.

The Clinking Chandelier

Glass bottles and golden ribbons make a clinking glass chandelier.

Glass, gold & light – these are 3 elements which can definitely up any house to give it a rich & glamorous feel. And in our next project we decided to take all three of them together. Time to exude exuberance.

Our starting point was whole lot of these mini-sized perfume bottles, which had abstract floral golden motifs on them. So golden became our obvious choice to supplement the bottles. The idea was simple: to bunch up the bottles together in random fashion, so that when they are slightly touched, they make this rippling-clinking noise effect. Music to the ears I tell you. And through the glass-bunch pass a hanging bulb, that would help give a shimmery reflect.

We used golden ribbons to tie the bottles at their neck and a holed utensil lid was used as our support a   suspender, from which the bottles would hang. The idea was just to randomly tie the bottles at varying     heights, so as to fill the bulk, yet let the bottles be freely inter-spaced.  
                                                    

Once all the bottles were tied, we suspended a light fixture from the center hole. And we were done!

The chandelier was such a quick work, as it just required tying the bottles and hanging them up. And the results are definitely quite richly dramatic.

In dark nights, the glimmer will cast. And with blowing winds, the clinking will last.

Tying and hanging is the easiest craft exercise to undertake. You basically require 3 elements totally – 1. A supporting body on top, 2. A suspender (rope/ribbon) and 3. Quirky elements that could be tied & hanged. A kid’s gym or a suspended fish-tank; the possibilities and themes to make are endless. 

Glow Willow from Below

A potted-leafless-branching tree, glows in a diffused-gold-bulbing undergrowth.

Leafless & lifeless branching trees have this ghostly beauty about themselves. The dendritic patterns & shadows create enchanting designs. I’ve always been spookily & creatively drawn to them, as I realize that these naked branches used just the way it is, can create quite a unique design experience.

The first task was to find the branch itself – which had just the right branching, just the right height and just the right strength. Boy! With an intense search of 13 days, 13 hours and 13 minutes – we finally found the perfect kind we needed.

Post getting the branch, we nicely cleaned it up - removed the years of dirt that settled on it. After the cleaning and drying, we touched it up with strokes of metallic gold paint. We painted it up to give our décor piece a more rich & suitable for home feel.

Once the branch was ready, we erected it in a simple cylindrical pot. The idea is to keep the pot as simple as possible, so that the natural beauty of the naked branch is not clashed with.

Our idea was to fill the pot brim with sprouting bulbs, so that the diffused light from below would subtly cast a golden-glow on the tree. In order to do that we firstly created a connection of the required 10 bulbs in parallel wiring (finally my class X physics come to use). The parallel connections seems at first difficult, but the idea is to just be sure that the same colored live wires are all connected together and the other colored neutral ones together, and all finally end in 2 terminal sources. Quite a few online tutorials are available to help better understand.

Post that we interspersed and injected these bulbs in a thick thermacol sheet. Being careful of the wiring always! The crate of thermacol & bulbs was then put around the branched tree. Since the wires are still visible, we put in small stones all over the pot and around the bulbs.

To finally reveal our masterpiece, just plug in and switch on the lights. Get aback… and absorb the beautiful-rich-soft-golden-glow of the haunted-leafless-branched-tree!

It is guaranteed to get you goose-bumps!

Always be careful when connecting multiple wires together. Be sure the the live and neutral wires never come in contact. Also wire-joints should be well connected and insulated. A quick and easy way is to twine the two ends of the wire and then add a drop of hot glue off the glue gun. Let it cool and dry. This will not only create a permanent joint but also create the required insulation.

Good Gold Times

Decorative golden plate converted into a decorative golden clock!

Good memories are made by good times, and good times are definitely made better by viewing it in a good clock! So all it takes is a good clock to make a good memory. As simple as it can be.

Let’s cut short the philosophy and focus on clocks!

Well, a clock apart from the elementary work it does of showing time can become quite an exquisite home décor article.

A couple of days back, we saw this gold-oozing, decorative serving plate at the local market. It was that kind of an item which drew your attention to it and made sure it never went away. So I bought the plate just with the sole intention of reforming it into a clock. Coz I knew that this one article would be enough to embellish any pale wall.

All we needed to do is drill a hole to through its center. Then put a time-piece from behind – (you can take from an old clock or just buy a new one). Lastly added the black hands in front – hours, minutes, and seconds. Time to tick on. Another look that can be tried is by attaching a pendulum to the clock. Time to tick on again.

As I thought, when we put this clock on a blank wall, the entire wall emblazoned with the solid golden beauty of the clock. It’s so cool to see that such small measures have such great impacts!

Good-gold times, ticking on…

If you have any old decorative plate, just drill a hole through its center, add a time-piece in behind and the hands in front. Hang it and that’s it; you have made a brand new clock which is ready to flaunt your walls.  

Steel Roses

A shimmering lamp-shade made from steel wool scrubbers.

Twinkle, shine, sparkle, shimmer, glitter, and glimmer – let’s make our homes a little more brighter!

Steel wool scrubber – it is such an exciting element. Yes seriously! Whenever I see them they remind me of blooming, shiny-grey fantasy roses! Sans the delicate fragrance, of course.

So to make a lamp out of it was an idea, which has been tickling me since when. The first thing was to go shop for a few of these scrubbers.  The shop-keeper wondered what we needed so many scrubbers for. How many utensils he presumed we had to wash?

To tie up the scrubbers in a concentric fashion was our starting point to make the lamp. One scrubber in the center, attached to five petalling scrubbers around it. Followed by another couple of rounds. Each scrubber needed to be attached to each side of the adjacent scrubbers. 

Our canopy of the steel wool was thus ready. Now, the shape that we form can be as per our liking. We can either make a complete round ball-like structure or keep it like a half-opened-umbrella structure. I preferred the latter. In order to make the structure more defined; we inter-spaced thin yet strong metal wires around the circular layers of the structure. Thus, we get defined shape and solidarity.

The next step was to attach our steel canopy to a hanging light-bulb fixture (the one we used is from Ikea – they are inexpensive and easily available locally too). Lastly, it is time to hang this quirky steel-wool DIY lamp in our house – over the dining table or in a conspicuous corner.

From a lousy utensil cleaner to a definite head-turner: this journey seems quite transformational.

Twinkle, shine, sparkle, shimmer, glitter, and glimmer – our homes are now very much more brighter!

Just like clothes-fashion, where a little bit of bling can transform your entire look – so is the case with our homes. Add bling in appropriate doses to make your home stand out. Bling on cushions, lamps, photo-frames, all will make your home more glamorous and eye-catchy. One caution – not to overdo it! 

Wall of Thrones

Painted wooden wall hangings inspired from ‘Game of Thrones’

Obsession – that’s one word that the Game of Thrones series have created. And we’re yet another victims of it. From the conspiracies to the drama, the blood-shed to the passion – it’s all so bloody damn invigorating.

This obsession became our new inspiration – to translate the Gamer of Thrones euphoria into a creative home décor art piece. And we thought that a creative representation of the 7 kingdom sigils overlaid on the map of Westeros & Essos would combine all the essence of our inspiration.

Raw wood – that became our base. We got the wood bark cut into fattish circular discs. No treatment, no polishing required – just kept it raw.

We painted the following sigils of the famous houses on these wooden discs:

1.       The Direwolf of House Stark

2.       The Crowned Stage of House Baratheon

3.       The Golden Lion of House Lannister

4.       The Rose of House Tyrell

5.       The Kraken of House Greyjoy

6.       The 3-Headed Dragon of House Targaryen

7.       The Moon & Falcon of House Arryn

Lastly, we screwed in hook-clips on the back-side of the wooden-sigils. With hooks on we can hang them in the fashion we desire. We made an outline of the ‘the known world’, and hanged the wooden-sigils at the houses’ respective locations on the map.

Our fantasy inspired, wall-art is ready to be displayed and the castles ready to destroy each other, because, “When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.” 

Hangable wall-art is a great way to showcase our inspirations and creativity. Chose a plain wall in your room and put and change interesting art-pieces. So every time guests come in, you have something new to flaunt.