This was a quick fun project, but I’ll preface this one by saying that I wasn’t given very much time to work on this!

I was asked to make a card for a friend who was leaving the UK for Canada, and it had to be done in less than three hours. It sure sounds like a lot of time, but I had not even begun the creative thinking process! Well, when you think of Canada, you think of the national flag, right? Surely someone out there had already come up with a way to fold a maple leaf and I can just fold it myself!

I read a multitude of visual tutorials and watched a few videos on it. It took a few attempts and the one that worked for me on the day was this video by Muneji Fujimoto ORIGAMI CHANNEL. I would say it’s definitely an intermediate-level project as you need to be confident in sink folds, but it does not take long to make, even if you have to rewind the steps a few times.

I cut out a piece of 20cm red paper to use as my base and folded a leaf that was about 10cm tall. If I wasn’t so pressured for time, I would have spent more time focusing on neater folds, but you work with the limits that you are given… Fortunately the result was serviceable enough!

Since I was making a flag for the front of my card, I did not have to do anything complicated for the cardmaking step. I used a plain red card base and stuck a smaller piece of white card on top with a glue pen. Then I affixed the maple leaf to the white card by using some glue dots on the leaf parts.

I could have cut the red card bigger so that it looked more like the flag with larger red borders, but I just wanted to make a small card that could be easily packed away. I also don’t use ink stamps for messages at the moment, so I end up having to write a long message inside the card to fill up the space!

I heard they were quite impressed with the card! It was practically delivered the same day that I made it, so you can see why I had to work quickly! I’ve never been to Canada, I would love to visit both them and the country!

Materials used:
– 20cm square of red double-sided paper
– 13cm red card base
– 12 x 13cm white card

Tools used:
– Craft knife and cutting mat
– Liquid glue pen
– Glue dots