Craft Gossip

The largest independent craft review site since 2007

Kanzashi in Bloom Book Review And Giveaway

by

kanzashi_in_bloom_cvr_150_0

Kanzashi in Bloom by Diane Gilleland

What is Kanzashi?

The term Kanzashi refers to elaborate hair ornaments worn by women in Japan. They originated around 1600. Check out wikipedia for more information.

This book is filled with fabric folding techniques to create the basic flower which can then be turned into many many different projects. Including jewelry and much much more. You are only going to be limited by your imagination.

The photos are amazing and you are left digging around in your fabric stash for something to get started with.

kan

–Win Win Win—

We have 2 copies of this wonderful books for you to win. For your chance to win please enter the competition here.

Competition is open -Worldwide

Competition closes – 1st of August

Read These Next

Comments

  8. Kanzashi is so much fun – and it is really simple and easy once you get the basic principles down. That book is amazing as well – I have it on order.

Have you read?

Build a Paper City with Free Printables

My daughter’s school has project-based finals instead of tests in the spring, and in her geometry class last year the students constructed a scale model of a town complete with three-dimensional buildings. 

Of course building a paper town doesn’t have to include a geometry lesson (they also calculated the volume of their buildings) but it is a fun way to get kids to express their creativity by decorating the buildings and talking about the things they would want to include in their own town. 

Putting buildings together is a test of fine-motor skills, and if kids are working on a town together they’ll need to negotiate what goes where and why. 

Get started with the house printables from Kids Activities Blog. They’ve got a “plain” roof house and a “fancy” roof house to choose from. Just print, color, cut out and assemble. 

You might want more than just houses in your little town, though, so I went hunting for some more printable templates you can use to make different kinds of buildings. 

Brother has printable skyscrapers, cars, people, trees and lights (shown above) that are meant to be printed in color buy you can do them in black and white so kids can color them in if you want.

Printablee has another colorized set of paper buildings including different kinds of houses and something that maybe looks like a church or school. 

If you’re willing and bale to pay for printables to use in your paper town, there are lots of great ones available on Etsy. Ludlow Prints has a collection with a school, grocery store, bakery and other buildings, while Paper Fun By Yumi includes things like a hospital, fire department and police station (essential if you’ve done a community helpers unit!). 

Tiger Bee Learning has a printable set with 20 different buildings, including a bank, library, museum and zoo to name a few, as well as a blank template for kids to design their own buildings. Once you have the basics of making a piece of paper into a 3D building down, kids are sure to want to make their own buildings to add to the town. 

Older kids can also write about why they picked the buildings they did, and littler kids will have fun building their town over and over again. 

[Photo: Brother]