T is for Tiger, C is for Craft

These wonderful little letters are from Markus at Digitprop – a site loaded with great papercraft creations, including a whole alphabet that you can print, cut out and assemble.

If you decide to do that you have more patience than I. His latest post has a great tutorial on assembling the alphabet letters. Too late for mine which I printed on regular copy paper (too lightweight) and assembled with increasingly sticky fingers as mine got covered in glue. But even with my patience wearing thin I found these cheerful letters a pleasure to work on. I love the colorful and whimsical designs.

Each letter is about two inches wide at the base and two inches tall. I started with the T is for Tiger since it looked pretty easy and who could resist this adorable little face?

I fully admit to cheating with some colored pens when I didn’t get all the seams matched up and glued perfectly.

Markus suggests putting a weight of some kind in the base to keep the letters from toppling over and it was a good idea he did. I used a coin in one, a button and beads in others. They still look a bit off-balance.

After completing the little Tiger I made A is for Astronaut.

His boots were a challenge and I seemed to make them worse the more I fiddled with them. These are fairly fiddly little things to put together. As I mentioned before, heavier paper would have helped.

I decided I was ready to try the R is for Rainbow with all it’s tricky curves and angles.

Rem pointed out that I could stop with these three letters as I could spell out:

I could also spell TAR or RAT but I kept on with my original plan. Next up was the F is for Fly.

When I finished C is for Chameleon I finally had CRAFT!

These great papercraft letters have a home at the base of my lamp on my craft desk.

Just in case a whole alphabet of three-dimensional letters crafted from paper isn’t enough, Markus also created his own take on nesting Matryoshka dolls! In fact, it was this link sent by a friend (thanks, Sam) that got me to Digitprop in the first place.

Those of you who’ve been reading for awhile may remember the Matryoshka Dolls Card I made back in February along with a long post showing various Matryoshka-themed items from Etsy.

The Matryoshka Dolls on Digitprop are also made of paper but they really nest one inside the other.

Not only was I drawn to Matryoshka Dolls after making my own version, but I love the unique take that Markus has. I could make an astronaut to go with my letter A astronaut. Or a Scientist. I knew I didn’t have the patience to make all 6 but I decided to make the smallest two.

Here is the Princess with the template for the Rosie. Rosie as in Rosie the Riveter, which just happens to be who I dressed up as for Halloween! (And Princess, you know who you are!)