With both adult and kid sizes available, samurai of all ages will be ready for cardboard battle.
crafts (Page 5)
A few dollars and a handful of materials are all you need to make your very own lightsaber—and this crafty father shows us how!
Who doesn’t love beer and edamame? But you can’t eat or drink these … because they’re candles!
It’s simple, eco-friendly and takes its cues from nature when keeping your house from getting too dry.
Shift from folding paper to folding cloth to create beautiful hair ornaments, earrings, and decorations for any occasion.
This beautiful grandmother shows the world there’s no age limit when it comes to having fun.
Christmas is over, but that doesn’t mean the magic of the season can’t live on. Check out these amazing snow globe accessories trending on Twitter!
At one time, nearly all of the 270 households in the village of Shawo would have been engaged in woodcraft, but today just six elderly men know the old techniques. Luckily, a younger generation is taking steps to ensure that the craft does not die out.
Halloween is less than a week away! Do all of you have your costumes ready?
If you’re still looking to add a nifty additional touch, then you can do as these handy DIY-ers on Twitter did and turn inexpensive, 100-yen (US$0.84) water guns into clever, steampunk-ish accessories. All it takes is some paint and a little creativity!
October 31 is quickly approaching and for those of us who don’t have our costumes or decorations ready yet, you’d best hurry. Sure there are plenty of last-minute costumes and decorations you can scrounge up, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t compare to something meticulously planned out.
A carved pumpkin is one decoration you can complete in a few hours, but if you really want to lure the trick-or-treaters, you have to go the extra mile. Check out this amazing pumpkin that shows us the day in the life of lovable Luigi and his haunted mansion. It would look awesome on your front porch, and even more so with a special little addition.
Handmade goods have a certain appeal that seems to transcend time. As much as we love our precisely designed and machine-crafted products, it’s hard to deny the draw of individually crafted items. Whether its watches or high fashion, knowing something was put together by a dedicated worker just makes it that much better.
So while these cat bags are nothing short of insanely adorable, the fact that they were all individually handmade by one person makes them that much more awesome! Read More
The visual arts are, for a writer like me, akin to magic. I see the finished product and the raw material and I basically have no idea how the artist got from point A to point B — even if I actually watched them work through the entire process! And when it comes to sculptures, all bets are off. You could tell me a wizard conjured the work whole with a wave of a wand, and I’d be hard-pressed to prove you wrong.
Fortunately, the incredibly talented Mio Hashimoto, woodcarver and artist, has written a how-to book explaining some of her methods and showing the detail of some of her adorable animal sculptures. Now, at least, I’ll know exactly how she achieved her results, even if I’ll never have a chance of replicating them myself. And for all you artists out there, aspiring or otherwise, this book will teach you how to make all the pets you’ll ever want!
Origami is one of Japan’s most well-known art forms. At its simplest, even children can enjoy it, and at its most complicated, it can be used for commercial purposes and designs. Now, one company has created special pieces of cloth that will automatically refold into their original origami forms after being stretched out. There doesn’t seem to be any particular, unique benefit to these pieces of fabric, but we sure want some!
Check out the mesmerizing video below!
People are often loathe to part with their books, even after they’ve finished reading them. Thick, hardbound editions in particular have a sense of presence that entices literature lovers to hang on to them.
Sure, maybe you’re never going to go back and leaf through that heavy tome again, but doesn’t it look stately as it sits on the shelf? It might, but it would look a lot cooler if you used the pages to make one of these amazing folded paper pieces of art.
If you watch a lot of samurai movies or TV shows, you might have noticed that a toothpick is about as common a costume accessory as a set of paired swords. The reason isn’t because samurai were particularly fastidious about dental hygiene, though. Many fictional samurai stories re set in the Edo period, when the end of Japan’s centuries of civil war caused the warrior class’ power and prestige to begin slowly but surely eroding.
The samurai were a prideful bunch, though, and were loath to admit the new societal reality that swordsman had suddenly become a far less lucrative profession. So even if they couldn’t afford to regularly fill their stomachs, many would still lodge a toothpick between their teeth to give the impression that they’d just polished off a lavish meal fit for a man of high rank.
Of course, it takes more than just a toothpick to transform yourself into a samurai. You’ll also need to talk the talk, which is why these traditionally made Japanese toothpicks come individually wrapped with period-correct samurai phrases, and even helpful English translations and pronunciation guides.
Origami is known worldwide as the art of paper-folding, and while most people associate it with Japanese culture, it also has history in China and Europe as well. We’re not sure what it is, but there is something strangely satisfying about turning a flat piece of paper into a three-dimensional model resembling anything from flowers to animals to vehicles.
One particularly fun shape to make are ninja throwing-stars, like the ones you see above. If you’re in the mood for some crafts and would like to give it a try, follow us after the jump to get started!
Daruma are a kind of roly-poly wishing doll in Japanese Buddhism. You draw one eye in while making a wish, and then fill in the other when your wish comes true. Given their sweet purpose and blob-like shape, traditional daruma are already pretty charming, but a woodcarving shop in Kagawa Prefecture has found a pop makeover makes them even more attractive, so much so that there is a 3-year waiting list to get one!
Some of you may remember the fateful day last spring when our Japanese-language reporter Go bought what was probably the cheapest car in Japan by acquiring his current ride for just 980 yen (US $8.30). Nine months later, not only is his 1997 Mitsubishi Minica still firing on all three cylinders under its hood, but it recently passed its mandatory biennial safety inspection, called shaken in Japanese.
In celebration, Go treated the Minica to a wash for the first time since he drove it back to Tokyo from Nagoya. With a fresh coat of wax, it was looking better than ever, but Go still wasn’t 100-percent satisfied with the car’s appearance. See, Go believes the Mini is just an overall cooler car than the Minica, so he set out to transform the latter into the former using the finest vinyl sheets and magic markers he could find.
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