The life and times of a crafty teacher: Labor intensive twirled paper

Something you might not know about me: I enjoy labor intensive crafts. I have no idea what sparked this interest, but i can stay involved in the same project for a ridiculous amount of time. I guess knitting can be categorized into that category.

Anywho. After church on Sunday, my parents and I and another friend from church went to lunch at Cameron Village. My dad wanted to stop into Ten Thousand Villages to look for something and I, like always, wandered around looking for new crafts and stumbled upon this. Ok.. I know that some woman in the Philippines worked a long time for this, but I wanted to try my hand at it instead of buying it. So I took a mental image, went home and immediately started cutting up newspaper. I started with long strips and folded each side in then folded in half so no raw edges were showing. Then is the fun part. You just start wrapping it around itself. I worked on those coasters for about an hour and a half. Then I thought, well, they had a box for them at the store. I bet I could figure out how to make that. And I did! (2.5 hours later it was done!) Then I just mod podged the mess out of it (and yes that sentence makes sense to me). This was the final project:

Also, along the same lines, I am working on a gift for my grandparents who have a collection of crosses. Its not quite done yet, but I think its coming along nicely!