Column: From origami to bath bombs, here are crafts to pass the time during quarantine
Aaron Sugarman, Arts & Culture assistant editor.
The current stay-at-home order has me and other college students desperate for entertainment. There are only so many hours I can spend playing Animal Crossing and mindlessly browsing TikTok. Eventually, the human mind needs more.
My "more" came in the form of internet DIYs: a quarantine craft time. I have ventured into craft blogs and learned their secrets. Here are some of the best crafts you can do from the safety of your own home.
Origami
The world of origami is not new to me. In the fifth grade I sold origami ninja stars to my classmates during a school event. It’s a small wonder that I’m not in the business school, but perhaps selling paper weapons in elementary school foreshadowed my future peace, war and defense major.
Regardless, origami is accessible to every skill level. It's satisfying to work your way up from making boats to completing more complex projects like paper cranes.
Even better, origami requires practically no materials: just some paper and a decent amount of patience.
For my first piece I decided on making a hexahedron, which resembles a fancy triangular prism.
Working with the paper was less frustrating than I remembered, and after a relaxing few minutes of folding I had my hexahedron.
The pinwheel took longer than the hexahedron, and I spent more minutes trying to figure out the folding than I would like to admit, but in the end I was happy with the result.
Origami transformational pinwheel made by Aaron Sugarman.
Paper Heart Flowers
Just because we’re all forced to stay at home doesn’t mean romance has to end. Love can bloom regardless of the environment — and a paper flower might be the way into someone’s heart.
Imagine: you are texting someone special, and you send a picture of the paper flower you made. You say that you crafted every piece of the flower thinking of them. That may win you their adoration, or cause them to block you, but love is always a risk.
Or you might be like me, and just want something pretty for the house. Either way, making a paper flower is another craft that can be relaxing to make and requires few materials.
First you cut colored construction paper into lots of identical hearts. Then you tape the hearts to a stick, either colored green or wrapped in green construction paper, folding each heart inward a little bit more so they resemble the petals on a flower.
After repeating those steps a few times, you should be greeted with a paper heart flower to cheer up your day.
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In the name of science, I have attempted to create DIY bath bombs. I must admit, I know nothing about chemistry — scientific or otherwise — but a relaxing bath would be really nice in this stressful time.
There are a lot of recipes from blogs that have a long list of materials, but all you need is baking soda and citric acid to create the fizzing reaction. If citric acid is unavailable, you can substitute it with lemon juice.
You can make the bath bomb as fancy as you want by adding other ingredients: I added food dye and Epsom salt in order to make the bombs more colorful and smell like eucalyptus.
The journey begins by taking a half cup of baking soda and stirring it in a bowl while slowly adding small amounts of the citric acid.
While doing this step my parents kept referring to the mixture as “my experiment” — and I am unsure if this showed a lack of faith in my ability or perhaps a subconscious longing from them that I switch to a STEM major.
As you stir you can put in additives such as food dye or essential oils. After getting the mix to a cakey consistency, it's time to start molding the bath bombs.
In order to mold the shape of the bath bomb you can use anything from cupcake paper cups to leftover Easter eggs. I used both just in case one turned out to be more effective than the other.
After letting the bath bombs sit in their mold for a day or two, they should be ready for action. The cupcake paper cups turned out to be much better of a mold, and so I tested those bath bombs.
They fizzed and turned the bath blue, so I will consider them a success.
