If you’re still looking for a cool gift to give this season (or next) that’s also cheap, look no further: Cubeecraft is a free paper-craft website with an awesomely large selection of pop culture crafts. There are more than 300 doll-crafts to choose from on the site’s “Pop-Culture” section alone, and yet more in the original crafts and tie-in sections.
The paper dolls in Cubeecraft’s Pop Culture selection range from Spider Jerusalem of Transmetropolitan to Oscar from Sesame Street, from Moss of The I.T. Crowd to Fox Mulder & Dana Scully of The X-Files, and that doesn’t even begin to cover all of the options.
There’s something for every flavor of geek on your list—or, for yourself, if you want to decorate your house in papercrafts!
As you see in the opening and closing pictures of this post, I built a teeny paper Spider Jerusalem. (My love of Transmetropolitan is well documented on Tor.com.) His printable template is here. The website’s “scissor ratings” rank how difficult the craft is, and speaking as someone with bad eyesight, clumsy hands, and a fascinating level of incompetence when it comes to cutting straight lines, the one-scissor crafts are not difficult.
Little Spider is a one-scissor, and while mine is maybe not the cutest—I know, I know, he has lumps!—I enjoyed building it, and it sits in front of my TV. The process is mostly following the instructions, which are well-phrased and simple, cutting out around tabs that can be glued or taped together (glue sticks work pretty well for this). The details of the template are particularly fetching for little Spider, like the tattoos and the glasses. While some of the templates look a little strange in digital format, the way they come out in 3D real life is much cooler.
I have yet to try to build a figure that’s more than one scissor—if you guys try, you should post pictures of your creations! (Will anyone tackle a five-scissor project, I wonder?)
Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic and occasional editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. Also, comics. She can be found on Twitter or her website.
