Paper Christmas Decoration Tutorial

I found this tutorial online to make a paper Christmas decoration and it looked simple enough for a non-paper type person like me to try out so I did. I think it turned out really neat and was quick & easy that I thought I would share my experience making it.

I have done more hybrid in the last month than I have before and it brought me back to arts & crafts time in school which was always a fun time.

The final product:

Materials needed:
6 square pieces of paper - double sided
scissors
glue stick
hole punch or some way to make a hole for hanging
ribbon or string or something to hang it by for display

I started out by taking a digital paper I got in a freebie kit from signing up for a new digital scrapbooking store's newletter, Design House Digital. {The store doesn't actually open until January 1, 2010 but you can already sign up for their newsletter and get the kit as well as find out over December which wonderful designers are going to be at it. So far, Deena Rutter and Carina Gardner have been announced as designers for it with more to be revealed over the next couple of weeks... subscribe to the blog to find out who is going to be announced next}

This paper is the snowflake paper from the freebit kit from signing up. It is a wonderful kit and as beautiful as it looks on the screen, you need to print these babies out & see how truly gorgeous they can be for not only digital products but hybrid projects too!

I printed mine out on double sided matte paper but I also printed it out on plain white normal copy paper and it also looks beautiful. Either types of paper will work for this project. The copy paper makes a nice light weight version and the matte paper makes a more solid, crisp version.

I had my printer center and crop to fit my paper as you need the pieces to be squares. So once printed out, I trimmed off the white edges with a cheap little paper trimmer.

I am not a paper scrapbooker so don't have all the cool tools so make due with what I have. I am sure a nicer paper trimmer would make a cleaner edge but either works for this. You could even fold over, crease the edge and then use a knife to cut off the edges as you might do with wrapping paper.

You will need 6 squares of paper for this. Since I let my printer automatically center and crop my paper, my squares ended up being about 8 inch squares. This resulted in a final project size of about 21 inches from point to point in each direction... so pretty big!

First fold it from corner to corner making a triangle. If you are using the thicker matte paper, try not to crease it too hard otherwise, the crease will be harder to roll out later. This is mainly to serve as putting the paper in a shape to make the cuts really easy to make.

Next, fold the triangle in half again so that it is a quarter the size of the original paper. You can either do this & only need to make half the cuts or you can gently mark where center is going to be & do your cuts individually for each side of the triangle. I was lazy so folded it in half & did half the cuts of what the original tutorial I was following did.

Next, you will make your cuts. If you want to do each side individually, click on the tutorial link at the top of this post. If you want to do the lazy way but still effective way, stick with me :)

You can choose how many cuts to make, stopping about 1/2 an inch to an inch from the center fold of the triangle. The open edges of the triangle should be going parallel with your cuts... otherwise, you end up with a useless cut piece of paper as I made the mistake of doing when I was making mine & ended up needing 7 pieces of paper to complete my star.

I only did 2 cuts on this one. I also tried one doing 4 cuts and the original tutorial shows with 3 cuts. All of them look really cool and give slightly different looks.

Once your cuts are done, unfold the paper and yours should look similar to this.

Now, we are going to begin the rolling & gluing.

Put a dollop of glue on one triangle corner of the center cut piece. Fold the other corner over it to form a roll. Hold until the glue has stuck it together.

I found that especially with the thicker matte paper, I needed to hold each roll for a few minutes making sure that the edges were well stuck together. The copy paper didn't take as long to stick together and stay.

If you don't hold it long enough to be well stuck, it likely will unroll as you are gluing the next rolls and once the other rolls are glued, it is harder to get your fingers in to hold the center roll together.

Next, you are going to flip the paper over and do the same to the middle cuts as you did for the center cuts.

This is going to make it so that the center curl is curled the opposite way of the middle curl and is what gives some interest and dimension to the project.

Flip the paper over again so that the center curl is facing up. Now you will curl the outer cuts together and glue them.

The center and outer curls will be going the same direction and the middle curl will be going the opposite direction.

If you do more cuts than just the 2 that I did, just be sure that you are alternating which way each curl goes to give it the neat look.

The final step is to join together the 6 individual pieces together into a final star. To do this, you will first put them together in groups of 3.

I glued the bottom peaks of 3 of them together making sure that the longest curl on each one of them was on the same side. Repeat for the other 3. Once you have 2 groups of 3 pieces stuck together, put the two groups together. I chose to alternate the direction of which side the long curls were on. So on my top half, the long curls were on the right and on the bottom half, the long curls were on the left side. I think you could do it either way and it would still look lovely but this way, I found that the long and middle curls fit together better to form the star.

A final bit I did which wasn't in the tutorial was to take a thin strip of the patterned paper and cut a long enough rectangle to wrap around where I had joined the 2 halves of the star pieces together. I just thought that it gave it an extra little nice finishing touch but it looked nice without it as well.

Then I used a hole punch to punch a hole in the top point that I wanted to hang it by. I attached a piece of ribbon through the hole and then strung it up to hang from the bottom of one of the stair rods of our spiral staircase. It is an area that I am never sure what to do with but it works nicely to hang things from it as they can gently twist and twirl with any slight air movement in the room.

So as you can see from the instructions, it is really a very easy little project and quick. It is something that you could even get the kids involved in making to decorate around the house.

End Result:
* no papercuts - yay!!
* one broken nail from slipping using the little knobs on my paper cutter & jamming my finger into the table but it needed cutting anyways
* slightly sticky fingers from glue but they let go & a little soap & water & all better
* fun playing with paper
* lots of ooo'ing & ahhh'ing over how the paper printed out & how the star looks hanging in the room