Eeeee look, I made these paper owls from El hada de papel. These were my Xmas tree ornaments, you know that I put that tree up for the past three years with nothing on it all.
Anyway these couldn't be easier to make, they had to be or I would not have made them. You just save up a bunch of toilet paper tubes, I cut mine crosswise in half with an x-acto—wow, is that really how you spell x-acto? I guess so—knife to make cute short owls. Measure and mark halfway all around with a pencil and then follow your markings with the x-acto (so weird) knife. Funnily enough I decided to try these owls on the same night that I decided to try buttered rum, the sweetie man thought maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Of course I thought it was a great idea, he watched me like a hawk and I only nicked myself once.
I've also had this art nouveau gift wrap paper for years, untouched, I've never even used it to wrap gifts. The poppy tattoo I have on my back, though, this is where I got that design, it's William Morris. Anyway I've started to use it to cover my notebooks and other stuff, so I made an owl out of each different paper. I cut strips with my rotary cutter (also drunk, haha) and glued them all around each tube, folding and gluing it under at the bottom. Not at the top though, I just lined the edge of the paper up to the top edge of the tube so as not to add any extra bulk.
Then you just smush the tops of the tube in to make the ears.
I cut the eyes out of white office labels, I have a circle template that I traced the circles with. I stuck them on and outlined them and did the eyeballs with a gold sharpie paint marker.
The wings I made a template out of a business card, a teardrop shape, and cut a bunch of wings out of scrap gift paper. They didn't show as well as I wanted, so I outlined them and did the beaks in silver sharpie.
And that's it, I sat them right on the tree branches. Next year I'm going to make a snowy owl out of an oval kleenex box to rule them all—i.e., for the tree topper. Also I think it's funny that I'm going in for owls just now, it's like being Frodo at the time when all the elves are fucking off to the west.
I put them away in a really pretty glittery silver box that Shanna sent me Xmas cookies (ginjabreads!) in. Until next Winterval! I think next year I will put up the tree on Winterval Advent, where it will greenly stand until I get around to decorations. There will be twenty-three owls plus the snowy owl topper, so maybe I can put one owl on the tree every day starting the first of December until Xmas and that can serve as my Advent calendar?
