Not quite origami, but with origami elements, or a card model, papercraft is something that falls between the two model making genres and allows people to create things and characters they love using paper, tape or glue and scissors. If you love video games, and are looking for a nice, quiet activity to do on New Years Day, then you should stop by Ninjatoes’ papercraft webpage and print out some patterns and instructions in advance.

Ninjatoes has a nice little collection of patterns and models up on the site – 66 total. The newest additions are in the Advance Wars category, and include Green Earth, Blue Moon and Orange Star stealth planes. The site is organized nicely – there’s an index of all available models, photo galleries for each model so you can get a better idea of how much detail is really in it and…

Here he is, straight from Kirby Squeak Squad to cross stitch, angel Kirby. I recently decided to try my hand at cross stitching sprites, with the familiar pink blob as my test subject. I used one of the images from the Spite Database, enlarged it with Microsoft Paint, and then started working on bringing Kirby to life.

The whole project took a total of about an hour and a half to two hours. I wasn’t really keeping track and didn’t actually expect to finish the entire piece in one sitting – I started around 8pm because I was bored, and I was finished before the end of Boston Legal. His feet feature two different shades of magenta, his body has three different shades of pink, his wings and halo contain two shades of yellow and white and of course there is a black border around his body.