Fun with Geeky Papercraft Projects

So with the geekling officially due in less than 2 weeks, I was given a medical recommendation to stop work a week earlier than planned. I feel like I’ve cleaned as much as I can, and I have all of this time on my hands where I’m supposed to be off my feet and resting. I’m a multi-tasker and don’t sit around doing nothing very well, so to keep me busy while on the couch I’ve been trying my hand at some fun papercraft projects, and now you can, too! (Best of all? They’re all FREE!)

Paper Box World

I may have mentioned that our geekling’s nursery theme is dinosaurs, so back when I began scouring the Internet for various dinosaur items, I had come across these great dino papercrafts by Paper Box World and saved them for a rainy day. It’s not raining today, but when you’re stuck resting it might as well be! Paper Box World has four different dinosaurs to choose from: Andrew, Morris and Sam, along with a Pepasaurus. Andrew the Triceratops gave me a little squee, so that’s what I started with. I gotta say, I love the simplicity of the instructions; Andrew was a 2 page print-out, where half of the first page was a very easy-to-follow assembly diagram that needed no other explanation. I like simple projects that yield adorable results! You’ll want to bring some scissors (the smaller and pointier the better) and perhaps an X-acto knife for the slits in Andrew’s head for his horns. Tape could be used to secure flaps, but I brought along a glue pen for more precise assembly. I printed as large as my personal printer could, at a typical 8.5″ x 11″ size, but I’ll admit some of the parts are still pretty small and detailed when you get down to cutting. (Note the spiky jagged tab edge!?) This also meant that the tabs for putting my dino together were pretty thin and small. Too small for little hands and a bottle of Elmer’s, for sure. (Flashbacks of the glue-y mess of my kindergarten teaching days ensued, where kids used half of their Elmer’s bottle to affix a single piece on their cut-and-paste project, excess glue oozing everywhere.) All in all, this provided me with lots of fun and a cute dino to put on a shelf in the geekling’s nursery. Paper Box World has several cute designs to choose from on their site.

Cubeecraft

Cubeecraft is the epitome of geeky papercraft fun, in my opinion. The site is chock-full of free papercraft toys you can make, including a pop-culture section with over 200 designs from superheroes to Venture Brothers to anime. Some of my favorites include the various Star Wars (big surprise) and 8-bit style Mario Bros cubees, but I am in love with the fact there is a Strong Bad cubee, so that’s what I made today. The pop culture references range from mainstream to obscure, so chances are you’ll find something in Cubeecraft’s various collections to tickle your geek fancy. What I enjoyed about the construction portion of cubees is that you don’t need tape or glue since the designs are composed of interlocking flaps to make it even easier to put your toy together. I also appreciate that each design has a difficulty rating that you see before you download. For example, on this Spock cubee, it rates the difficulty of the design as one pair of scissors out of a scale of five scissors. The difficulty scale lets you know if regular scissors and effort will suffice, or if you should grab an X-acto knife for more precise and tiny cutting maneuvers. More info on the scissor scale can be found in their FAQ. You may have also noticed that when you select a cubee to download, it will suggest related cubees you may be interested in, too. I think this is really helpful since the designs don’t appear to go in any kind of consistent order; you won’t necessarily find all related characters listed together on the site. As far as true difficulty, most cubees are fairly simple, but at first glance you may feel a little overwhelmed with all of the lettered “tabs” though it’s pretty easy to see how it’s supposed to fit together, and this project went together faster than the dino. While even the easiest cubees require just basic cutting, all cubees require some kind of “hobby knife” (aka X-acto knife) to cut the little slits used for the interlocking tabs, so keep that in mind!

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Both of these papercraft sites are full of fantastic afternoon fun, but aren’t necessarily small-child-friendly if you’re looking for an activity to do together with your little one. An X-acto knife is not something for little hands, and some of the tabs and details may be too small to be cut without the use of something sharper and more precise than safety scissors, which could also pose a safety hazard depending on the age of your geekling. However, slightly older kids will delight in helping with the non-X-acto parts, and all kids would love to be presented with a cute little toy that you can whip up for them in no time.

An even better idea for geeklings is to let them design their own papercraft characters that you can then put together… well, together! Matthijs Kamstra has a basic cube tutorial for making your own papercraft on his site – using his template to print the basic cube shape means kiddos of all ages can doodle their own characters and designs for endless papercraft fun! (And it’s ok, geek parents, to admit you could also use the template to make your own favorite characters, too!)

Happy geeky papercrafting!