We're kind of weirded out by the whole concept of Printable Offerings — life-size paper facsimiles of everyday objects. It probably has something to do with their inspiration: the traditional practice in Chinese culture of buying paper objects for the recently deceased and burning them so they'll have those objects with them in the afterlife. Uh-huh.

Reasoning that it would be more eco-friendly (and just easier) to burn paper objects made from your home printer rather than bought in a store, PO provides printable PDFs of plenty of typical belongings. After a little downloading, you can print out foldable paper simulations of pens, passports — even the ever-popular Apple iPhone.

Curious about the "experience," we printed an iPhone from the site and put it together. We weren't sure quite what to expect, but we can say that the ratio is just a bit smaller than life-size (which could have just been our printer scaling the A4-size files to letter size), but the detail is very good, possibly enough to fool someone just glancing at it. Besides burning, the ersatz objects might be handy in performing social experiments: try replacing your coworker's stapler, pens and other supplies with paper replicas and see how long it takes for them to notice. Dude, did I just write a teaser for The Office?

Via Printable Offerings