Time to get your house ready for the Spring festival and decking it up with Chinese New Year decorations!
Instead of buying, why not be a little creative and make your own decorations instead? It's fun, it doesn't cost much and you will no longer wasting money throwing out all the decorations after end of the Spring festival every year.
Originating from Southern China, the tradition of giving mandarin oranges is known as “song gam” in Cantonese. Coincidentally, it also means “giving gold”. The character 桔 (jú – tangerine) looks similar to 吉 (jí), which also means “luck", while the golden color is festive and represents wealth and fortune.
Mandarin oranges are a symbolic of wealth, abundance and good luck, and exchanging them between family and friends has always been a key tradition during Chinese New Year celebrations here in Singapore.
DIY these paper origami mandarin oranges and make your home look auspiciously ready for CNY!
You'll need:
Orange, gold color papers in Square size
Green color papers for leaf
A pair of scissors
Tips:
- Paper size of 21cm x 21cm (*Cut from A4 size), will make 6cm x 6cm Orange after folded.
- Paper size of 29.7cm x 29.7cm (*Cut from A3 size), will make 9cm x 9cm Orange after folded.
- Try using wrapping papers if you prefer a bigger size Oranges.
- Use Paper Creaser or a ruler to score the folding lines.
Directions:
Follow the step by step instructions as shown.
FOR ORANGE:
The body of the orange is done!
FOR LEAF:
Follow the step by step instructions as shown.
Insert the leaf into the hole at the top of the orange and you are done!
Tips: You can glue the leaf to the orange by applying on the leaf stem and stick under the inner orange if intend to hang it up. Otherwise you can just leave the leaf sitting atop of the orange without gluing if you are placing it on tabletop.
Place the Origami Mandarin Oranges on your table together with the CNY goodies to bring the festive mood up.
You can also hang it up these Origami Mandarin Oranges on your pussy willows by adding a ribbon or string; or simply string it up and decorate the wall with some splash of tangerine!
To craft a hanging deco of the Origami Mandarin Orange, follow the above step and fold a 3D mandarin orange in smaller size first, then prepare some beads, tassels, cut out leaf shape and a string or ribbon to assemble all together.
Tips:
Cut a small hole at the bottom of the 3D Origami orange so you can string up.
The beads act as a stopper and also makes the hanging deco more prettier, otherwise you can just omit it if you do not have any.
The tassels we used were rather short and thus we used ribbon to add on the length, otherwise you can just string directly to the tassels if the one you get is long enough.
You can use any string or thin ribbon to string. The one we used here is 3mm think.
However the smaller it gets...the harder it is to fold! We are not going to tell you this is easy but doesn't these hanging 3D Mandarin Oranges looks so pretty and festive looking! Do give it a try as the end results are sure satisfying.
Either way, these 3D origami Mandarin Oranges are sure to impress your visitors and bring on some festive cheers this Chinese New Year!
