 Hi everyone, my name is Heather and I'm the person behind Happy Puppy Treffles. Today I wanted to share with you guys some tips on how to cut paper straight. I know that's one of the more difficult things in all this stuff that we do is getting used to doing that. And I know there's some people who might think, why wait, you don't cut origami paper, that's stupid, that's not allowed. I've seen that written so many times in the comment section. And I appreciate everybody's opinion, but you're wrong. No kidding. You guys can Google it. It says on Wikipedia about origami. But there's a whole thing that, you know, originally in the olden days, you know, long long ago, people used scissors. They used glue. They used, well, maybe not necessarily the scissors knives. I don't know large swords. No kidding. And they used needle and thread when making kucidama. There's so many things that were used. And it was only recently actually when origami became more popular that a branch of origami came out where they focused on using one single sheet of perfect square paper. And then including any scissors or any glue. And it's a beautiful division of origami. And the projects that people come up with for that are amazing and some very simple and beautiful. But not all origami has to be that. So we've got that out of the way. And I think with most things, of course, when you're dealing with scissors and you're cutting paper, you know, what kind of scissors you have makes a huge difference. I happen to have a pair of plus stainless scissors that I just happened upon when I moved to Japan. I just set up shop in my husband's father's office, his English school's office. And you just haven't have these scissors lying around. And they're amazingly nice. They have a great, nice, heavy weight to them. And I'm sure we're very expensive, probably, you know, when you consider scissors are like at the dollar store, you know, you know, these are actually really good high quality scissors. We're probably 15 to 20 dollars at least. But they're easily the best scissors I've ever owned. And you know, I love them. They are hoping fingers crossed. They don't loosen up on me too much or anything here. And they have a really nice clean blade still. So I would definitely recommend if you can get a pair of good scissors. The worst thing you can do is to try to do a project and have really crappy scissors. And have to run into trouble with that. So that's the first thing I always start off with. Having good scissors. There's other ways you can cut paper, of course. There's paper cutters. We have one of the old slice and dice things. Those things are terrible. If you get things on their right and you get enough pressure and you line everything up good and you have a good solid paper, you can probably cut pretty okay. The thing I always find that's troublesome about those things is that the stupid rulers on them never seem to be right. It says I'm cutting something that's 15 centimeters and it's not. So, you know, I would use that with care. And I've got some of those fancy scrapbooking, slicing kinds of things. And I just never thought they worked very well. Maybe just because I'm not doing anything that intricate. But I do have regular old exacto knife that you can use for cutting through things. And these kinds of things work great. And you can find ones that seem to meet the needs that you might have for stuff. And then I also have a perforating scissor, which I love, because I just think it's so cool that lets you, you know, create like the little edge so that you can tear away stuff from a project if you're working like that. So, I sadly don't find enough times when I use this. I think it's really cool, but I bought it so many years ago and I wanted to use it every day and I never use it. But that's one thing you can use, of course, if you wanted to have some other kind of cutting tool. But scissors really are the best thing to do. Now, when you usually are cutting some paper, there's a lot of different kinds of origami paper, of course. There's, for example, this kind of really fibrous kind of paper. And this was actually purchased in a roll. And it just never really seems to lose its roll. You kind of have to deal with that. That can be really tricky sometimes. You know, you can try to, you know, eliminate the roll of the paper by kind of molding it in your hands to get it to lay flat. And then you can try to cut a nice good straight line across. When you cut, you want to try to hold all of your work as straight up in particular with your table as you can. And I just always use the parts to the side of where I'm cutting as a guide and try to keep that as uniform as I can. Rather than focusing on where I'm cutting, I look at the excess. And that kind of tends to give me a good line. And, you know, if you start off and you just keep this edge of the paper against the edge of your scissors, you shouldn't have any trouble keeping things straight. And this is a nice thick paper so you can get a nice straight line edge without any trouble. And other kinds of paper work too in a similar way. If you've got obviously paper that has a pattern on it and you know you need to cut it off, try to choose a side that's going to make cutting it and trimming it a little easier. If I cut from this side, for example, it's going to be a little more difficult than if I'm trimming from this side. And I happen to know, for example, that I need to trim just shy of this edge. I can use that as a guide, the pattern itself as a guide, so that I can get a nice straight, perfect little edge there that is easy to do. So use the hands from your paper to try to find things that make it a little easier to cut when you're doing your cutting. I think one of the papers that's a little harder to fold is some of that thinner tissue paper kind of paper that's a little trickier to cut. Sometimes the fibers in these are really like rubbery almost and they just really don't like want you to cut at all. But if you're dealing with an edge, you're just going to treat it the same. You want to try to hold it in one hand, but you can see how it kind of is a little flimsy. Usually what I find out happens when I hold my papers, I wind up getting a little thumbprint, a little indentation because I'm kind of holding onto it well while I'm folding. I mean cutting. And if that bothers you, you probably want to figure out a different way to deal with it. I don't think it really matters because later I'm going to fold the paper anyway, so if I get a little dent, it's not that big a deal. But I like to try to keep it as straight as I can, and then just watch the excess of what I'm cutting and leaving over there so that I can get a nice straight edge. And that just helps keep things even for when you're doing projects. I think one of the things we find we do most often with craft and origami projects is you've got a paper and then you need to cut it down to size. And the way you do that usually is you can choose a couple of different ways. You can measure off and then draw a line for you to cut. And I usually have no problem with that, except that sometimes I wind up being in on it a little too much. And I still leave the remains of the line on my paper. And depending on the color of your paper, that can be annoying to see. I tend to just never even have a pencil around, so I just usually fold my paper to mark off how big something needs to be and then cut it. For example, if I wanted this to be 7 centimeters, I just line it up and get this part to just match up and then make sure that everything here is straight. And sometimes if you're a little unsure, if you've folded straight, you can check on the other side too to make sure that you're dealing with the same measurements. But usually it should line up pretty perfectly. But obviously you've got something like this as a crease and that can be a little tricky to cut actually because you have this indentation. And I find usually when I cut that I can't get it exactly in the center because I'm trying to line up with this outer mountain crease on the outer side. And that can be difficult and you wind up cutting a little to the inner part or the outer part, which makes your measurements off by a little bit and a little bit can be a lot in a project. So I make my crease usually and I usually then reverse it. And that just gives me a chance to smooth everything out. I even cut, smooth it out with my thumbnail and give myself a marked line there then. And then when I cut, I don't run into that trouble of that edge being in the way. And I can just follow. And when you get to the edge over here if you want you could kind of hold it like this so that you can get a nice smooth trimming of that side without having it kind of go, yeah, to the sides like it usually does. So that's one way you can kind of keep everything smooth when you're cutting and measuring things for an origami project. So a lot of talking and maybe a lot of stuff you guys already know. But I think if any of these tips are useful to you guys, I hope they help make some of your projects a little easier to use. I know one of the things that some people run into is if you're cutting like a double sided tape or something like that with your scissors, you wind up getting like gunk on the inside of your blade. And I find what works and you wind up ruining the eraser. But if you have any eraser and I don't even have one around to show you guys. If you have a little, and I have to say, I don't know if this works with those really ugly erasers we have in America that are pink. But if you take like a mono tumble eraser and just rubble against it, it's just a rubber eraser, you slowly gather the glue that's collected on the blade and wind up getting a clean blade. It does shred your eraser though. So you want to make sure it's not like your favorite eraser or your only eraser. You want to make sure you're doing that with with something that you can use for that purpose. I have any eraser just for cleaning my scissors. But or you try to keep in mind and use some other scissors that aren't important to you for cutting your double sided tape and then keep your nice scissors for your paper. So yeah, I was just, yeah, just some some tips and ideas about how to approach cutting paper. And I'm also going to be doing another kind of video talking about some different tips for folding, how to get good creases, how to you know increase your folding technique by what kind of you know origami projects can give you a chance to make the most common kinds of folds that you might use throughout origami. So I'll have that for you guys later on as long with lots of other fun projects and other things to share. So check back for that. Thanks again always so much for watching you guys and I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye!