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What to do if the design of the room is tired, and there is no money or effort for repairs? The fastest and not very expensive way is to change textiles and decor elements. And not all decor needs to be bought. For example, butterflies for decoration will help to bring an element of lightness. They make panels, wall compositions. Larger and brighter “live” on curtains or flowers.
Of what do
Butterflies on the walls are made from different materials, sometimes even exotic ones. The appearance of the resulting decor depends on this choice. While there is no experience and you do not really imagine the end result, you can make several different decorative butterflies for testing. They can be attached to the location of the planned decor. So it will be easier to evaluate the effect and choose the most suitable option.
Paper
Butterflies for paper decor are the easiest and cheapest to make. There are several different techniques. If the product is flat and it is glued entirely to the wall / panel, only the front surface is important. If a three-dimensional composition is supposed, the paper should be double-sided – both sides should be painted, because the white often “wrong side” spoils the impression.
Instead of ordinary colored paper, you can take corrugated paper. The effect will be different – it is lighter, airy, translucent, with its help it is easy to make the decor with butterflies voluminous.
You can make butterflies from an old magazine, newspaper, postcards, colored napkins, wallpaper of suitable colors, any other printed matter.
As you can see, there are a lot of options only from paper. Considering that they can still be slightly tinted, combined, made multi-layered, it is clear that there is a huge scope for imagination …
cardboard
Cardboard is not very dense. It’s more of a thick paper. It is also available in color and double sided. With its help, they often make voluminous decor – you can easily bend the wings relative to the body. This material holds its shape even better. It is only worth remembering that you can no longer make corrugated wings – the material is too hard to make a small fold.
It is also easier to make openwork butterflies from cardboard. Having a sharp enough knife, they cut out the “extra” leaving only the partitions. Such decorations require perseverance, great patience and accuracy.
Cardboard is also used to make templates for the “mass” production of identical butterflies. With the help of such stencils, you can make insects of the same type and size and spend a minimum of time on it.
the cloth
Having a template, you can make butterflies for decoration on a wall or a fabric chandelier lampshade. The fabric will need to be given additional rigidity, but otherwise the process is not much different: a contour is applied, cut out, decorated if necessary and mounted on the wall.
It is more difficult to work with fabric, although very interesting decorative crafts are obtained. This is an option for more advanced decorators and needle or sewing machine skills. With their help, you can recreate the veins on the wings.
Exotic materials
Old vinyl records will also be an excellent raw material for making butterfly decor. Since the vinyl is hard, to cut a butterfly out of it, you have to heat it up in the oven. And in order not to spoil the baking sheet, it must be covered with foil.
A contour is applied to the vinyl using chalk, the plate is placed in a preheated oven, as soon as it begins to soften, it is removed, and quickly cut out along the contour with scissors. Often it is necessary to heat the “workpiece” several times. After cutting out, heat for the last time and give the desired shape.
From beer cans or any other relatively soft tin, excellent flying beauties are also obtained. First you need to cut off the bottom and cover and align the piece of tin. Then, using an awl, transfer the contours from the template to the sheet, connect them with a marker and cut along the resulting contour.
You can decorate the back – the shiny part. This will require markers or felt-tip pens, you can try decorating with nail polish. Painted beauties are given the desired shape. One caveat: the edges are very sharp, you need to work carefully, otherwise cuts cannot be avoided.
How to make contour paper butterflies
We start with the simplest, but spectacular – contour butterflies. You will need colored paper or magazine pages, contour maps, etc. You can use old postcards or colored cardboard. You will also need ordinary cardboard – to cut out the template.
Preparing a template
We take a piece of cardboard – any, you can even some kind of packaging (tea, breakfast cereals, cereals, etc.), the main thing is that the cardboard is dense and not cellular. We find the silhouette of a butterfly that you like, transfer it to cardboard and cut it out. There are several silhouettes in the photo gallery. They can be printed, then cut out and transferred to cardboard.
Some tips for working with templates. Many butterfly outlines are given with two wings, but it is better to cut off one wing – it will definitely turn out symmetrically.
Decorations from winged insects of different sizes look good. Therefore, the same contour can be enlarged, reduced using the simplest functions of graphic editors – the same Paint that is on any computer. Since only the contour is important in this case, the quality of the drawing is not so important, so feel free to experiment with sizes. We cut out the printed template, apply it to the cardboard and circle it. We cut out a hard working template with which you can make dozens of identical elements.
Cut and fasten
We take a sheet of paper, fold it in half, apply a template, circle it. Cut along the drawn line. Next, we bend the wings from the “body”, we get a workpiece. Having cut out a certain number of butterflies, we attach them to the chosen place – on the wall, a piece of cardboard, etc.
You can mount it on ordinary glue (PVA is usually the best option), small strips of double-sided glue. Wallpaper paste, etc. can be used. If in doubt about the result, stock up on sewing pins. They can be mounted on the wall several times without much risk of damaging the surface. When you place all the butterflies and the result suits you, you can glue or use adhesive tape.
Fishnet
The situation is a little more complicated with openwork butterflies. They are made from paper or cardboard. It is important to have a good sharp knife and a template with lines printed on it, along which you will need to cut out excess paper. Needless to say, this is hard work.
The process is the same as described above: a template is prepared, then the required number of elements is cut out from it. The peculiarity is that small fragments are first cut out and removed, and then a contour is already cut out of a piece of paper. With such a sequence of actions, there is less chance of breaking thin jumpers, and it’s easier to work this way.
You need to work with a knife with a thin and sharp blade. It’s better not on the table, but by placing something solid enough – you can use a piece of plywood, chipboard, plastic, etc. But you need to understand that grooves and cuts will remain on the surface, so it will be problematic to use this piece for some other purpose.
Multilayer bulk
In the manufacture of multilayer volumetric butterflies, several pieces of the same shape are cut out (size and color may vary). They are stacked one on top of the other, the “bodies” are glued together, and the wings are bent at different angles. So these butterflies are more voluminous.
You can make a combination of openwork and contour butterflies. Take paper in contrasting colors or find the same color, but different shades. Make butterflies of the same shape out of them. Only some will be with openwork, others – without. Arrange them by placing a fragment without a pattern down. It turns out an interesting effect.
There is a technique that allows you to immediately cut out voluminous butterflies from paper. You will need two rectangles of paper – a larger one (for large wings) and a smaller one. We fold them diagonally once, then the second. There are two triangles of different sizes. Now, from two opposite sides, we bend the paper inward so that we get such a triangle as in the third photo (with a newspaper).
On the resulting triangles draw the wings. In large openworks, it can be located only along the edge, in smaller ones – over the entire area. We cut out the blanks and put one into the other, glue it. From above we glue the “body” cut out separately with antennae. Due to the fact that the paper is folded and the wings are double, the products have a larger volume.
Corrugated paper
It is easier to work with corrugated paper and butterflies for decor are more airy and light, since the paper is translucent. We select suitable colors, take threads, scissors, glue. Nothing else is required. We cut out rectangles from paper about 7 * 10 cm.
We sew the resulting rectangles in the middle with a needle and thread, tighten, make a couple of turns with a thread. It turns out something resembling a bow. We fold it in half, straighten the paper with our fingers, trying to leave as few folds as possible – we form wings.
When the result satisfies you, we take scissors, cut off a strip of a few millimeters from this edge – into the antennae. On the rest, we form a patterned edge resembling a butterfly wing.
We twist the strips of antennae with our fingers into thin tubes. Now they definitely resemble antennae. We unfold the wings and finally straighten them. We got light butterflies.
From folded paper
From double-sided colored paper or old magazines, you can make paper butterflies for decoration by folding them into a small accordion. We cut out two squares or rhombuses from paper (one a little more, the second a little less), fold them into a small “accordion”, starting from one of the corners. The smaller the fold, the more interesting the product will turn out.
Two folded rhombuses are folded one with the other, tied in the middle with a thread or flexible wire in a shell of a suitable color. From the remnants of the wire we make antennae, straighten the wings, if desired, correct the shape.
Photo for inspiration
To begin with, a little about how and on what you can attach already made paper butterflies. The easiest way is on walls or panels with glue. The second no less simple way is with double-sided tape. But to make the decoration more voluminous, it is best to glue it not directly to the wall, but on a small piece of foam rubber. You will get a more airy composition, with clear shadows.
Paper butterflies are used to create voluminous decorative compositions on small hoops with a fishing line tied to them. Cut out paper insects are fixed on the fishing line. You can’t hang them on the wall, but they look very original, although creating such a composition is more difficult than on the wall.
And several wall compositions that use butterflies for decor, made from different types of paper.