I love making toy origami boats where I volunteer with kids. It’s kind of like magic to turn a piece of paper into a boat and it’s fairly easy to do. Recently I picked up a Valentine’s Day card at Trader Joe’s that featured an illustration of paper boats with masts, sails, lines, flags and banners and my paper boat mind was blown. Could I turn these illustrated ideas into actual paper boats? I could. Meet my love boats.
Here we have the Sailing Vessel Lips. This love boat will go to a Swiss fellow who is 84. This boat is very much like one of the boats on the card except for the Swiss part and the addition of a boat name and a wood bead to cap off the mast. That stick would be a mast, wouldn’t it?
Next up is the Sailing Vessel Henry. This is a pirate love boat destined for a 4-year-old I know. There weren’t any pirate ships on the card, but I thought the heart and crossbones was a nice pirate/valentine mash-up. I cut out the bones and the heart and used a glue stick to adhere them to the red paper sail.
Did you know that the SS in front of a boat’s name stands for steamship? I had to look that up. These are definitely not steamships, so the SV is the way to go. I’ll bet you’re wondering how I got that print in the right place. Luckily I had a very old set of rub-on transfer letters that were just the right size.
Now this is the yarest* of them all, the swan love boat. I’m sure if this one had a name it would be True Love.
See how the swans are actually kissing? I remembered the swans from my asymmetrical paper chain post; they were just the thing to turn this into a swan boat. I didn’t make this one with any recipient in mind, then I thought of one and now I’m thinking I might want to keep it myself. Time will tell.
Perhaps you’d like to give this a try? Here are some instructions I like for the basic boat folds. If they don’t make sense to you, by all means watch a video and you’ll be folding boats in no time.
Materials needed include paper, both to make your boats and to create decorations (flags, hearts, banner pennants and swans in these examples). For the boat, use a bendable piece of paper, (i.e., not cardstock) in a rectangular shape – 8-1/2 x 11, 9 x 12 or something similar is a good bet. In these examples I used a piece of lined writing paper for one boat and papers from the Michaels scrapbooking section for the pirate and swan boats. Notice how those two boats have a white triangular section in the middle of the boat? That’s because one side of those papers was white. I folded my paper print sides together for the very first origami fold to get them to work out that way. Special papers aren’t really necessary. The first boats I made with cheap construction paper and stickers. They were super charming. You don’t have to get fancy if you don’t want to.
You’ll also need some kind of stick for the mast. I used lollypop sticks (called treat sticks) from the craft store. I also found some painted wood beads that had holes large enough to accommodate the treat sticks. I like the way they finished off the sticks, but you could use paper cut-outs or stickers on top of the sticks as well. In addition, some kind of twine or string or embroidery floss. I used baker’s twine and gold embroidery floss. I also used a glue stick and white glue and was glad to have a pair of small scissors meant for detail work and a sewing awl for poking a hole into the boat for the twine.
Let’s look at the back side of the pirate ship to talk about construction. Once your boat is folded, start by adding any decorations you want to the boat itself. Create any flags and additional decorations next. If you are using a mast, snip off the very tip on top of the triangular section in the middle of the boat. Bring your stick from the bottom of the boat up through the hole created. Run a line of white glue around the stick where it meets the paper when you are sure you’ve got it where you want it. Place any flags on the mast from the top before you cap it off with a bead or stickers or paper cut-outs. I made two short slits with scissors in the flag above – one towards the top, one towards the bottom to slide the pirate flag on the stick. The white pennant is glued and rolled around the stick on top of the flag. I also used a bead of glue in the bead to help it adhere to the stick when I was ready to cap it all off.
The twine comes next. You want to create a hole in the boat in one corner. Again, I found a sewing awl was perfect for this. Tie your twine under your bead onto the mast and thread through the hole in the boat from outside to inside. Then tie a knot on the inside and trim both tails of twine.
Isn’t it wonderful that such simple materials can be used to create such beautiful and whimsical little items?
* Did you ever see The Philadelphia Story with Katherine Hepburn? She had this great line in the movie where she said, “My she was yar.” She was referring to a boat she had with her ex-husband (Cary Grant) that was called the True Love. That might be a good movie to watch on Valentine’s Day actually.
♥♥♥
My Material Life 