Hinzpired

I love making snowflakes just for the joy of doing it.  I love folding up some paper, randomly cutting and then opening it up to see my results.  I don’t think one is ever too old for it, or if so that age must come later than 45, because I’m still enjoying it.

I’ve been enjoying seeing posts around the internet lately about patterns for snowflakes and different fold options for snowflakes.  I saw a post a few days ago about folding 5-fold snowflakes which reminded me about some word snowflakes I’d made in the past.  I actually first saw these several years back when a work-study student in my husband’s office made them with the names of all of the people in the department and hung them up as winter decorations.  I’ve been playing around with making snowflakes with coffee filters for the past few days, so decided to combine both ideas to make these.

First, here is a link to a pdf illustrating folding square paper into a 5 pointed star:

http://www.jessicajonesdesign.com/downloads/five_point_snowflake.pdf

I’ll  show my version using a round coffee filter below, but the link above may be helpful  if starting with square paper.

I used these coffee filters because I had a bunch of them in my cupboard left over from a previous project.  I found that it’s helpful to give them a quick once-over with an iron to flatten them out a bit.  I was able to flatten several at a time and it made them much easier to work with.

First, fold coffee filter in half:

Then fold it in half again:

Now open up that last fold.  Take the right-hand side and fold it up to the middle:

Open it up again.  The creases should look like this:

The next step is easy to do, but harder to show and explain.  Fold the crease that was just made to meet the center crease.  Open it up and it should look like this:

Now fold the right- hand edge up to meet the last crease made:

Next, fold the left-hand side over to meet the new right-hand edge:

Now fold  this in half:

Now, this can be cut in any way you choose.  Here’s a traditionally cut snowflake from one of my coffee filters:

For cutting words into the snowflake, here are my next steps.  First, I took my folded triangle and traced it several times onto a piece of paper:

I then started experimenting with drawing words and letters.  Here is my sketch for “joy”:

My drawing skills aren’t amazing, but that doesn’t really matter for this.  I just try  to be careful to keep my shapes simple enough to cut easily and also to keep everything connected.  At least a little bit of the edge on both sides of the triangle needs to remain intact, just as for any snowflake cutting.

When I was happy with my design, I cut out the triangle from the scrap paper.  I slipped this inside the top layer of my folded snowflake (and a note- I had to trim off a little tiny bit from both sides of my pattern to slip it inside) so that I could see it to trace my design:

I then traced it:

Then cut it out.  A hole punch can help to start cuts in inside areas:

All cut out:

And finished!

These can be flattened a bit with a book or pressed with an iron.  Here’s another one I made with the word “peace”:

I love that at first glance, these just look like any other snowflake, but when looking closer, the word shows up.

I’m off to make some more!

I love all sorts of star shapes, and a few days ago, I saw a pattern for some large paper stars on another blog.  They are similar to some stars that I’ve seen in a local shop, and I’ve always intended to try to make some to hang in my front window.  Someday, I’m still going to, but today I decided to make a smaller version of them.  

First, I found the original pattern here:

http://thisrecycledlife.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/decorating-for-the-season/

After downloading the pdf, I decided that I’d like to start with making a smaller version.  There are lots of ways to reduce patterns, but in this case, I used a setting on my printer.  By choosing “properties” and then “paper” I was able to choose an option that says “9 in 1″ that will prints nine pages in miniature form on one page.    This basically makes a 1/9 size pattern.  There are also other options, such as “1 in 2″ and “1 in 4″ that reduce page sizes as well.  I’m sure that other printers offer similar options.  I printed this on cardstock, which made a great pattern for tracing onto my paper.  

The paper I used for this project was some that I’d purchased  with a larger project in mind.  Unfortunately, my cat helped make it unusable for my original purpose by running across it with muddy feet, so now I am just working around the muddy spots and using it for smaller projects :).  For gluing this, I used YES! paste, which I really like for a lot of paper carfting.  It stays where it’s put, is workable for a longer time than some other glues, but also holds well as soon as you stick it together.  A tub of this will last for a very, very long time- I’ve had mine for a few years, I think.  I applied it with a smallish paint brush.  Here’s a picture of  it if you haven’t seen it before- it’s a very useful glue to keep around:

And finally, here is my finished product:

Rather than tying it together as the pattern mentioned, I just glued all of it together.  I also cut out a spiral from the paper I used to glue on the center because I like spirals and I thought it needed a little something else in the middle.  For hanging, I poked a hole in one of the star’s rays with a needle and threaded ribbon through.  I love my new ornament!.

My daughter and I have recently been having fun making simple cookie-cutter ornaments out of salt dough.  These are a few that my daughter has recently finished:

The recipe is really simple:

Stir together:

1 cup salt

1 cup warm water

Let this sit for a minute or two to allow the salt to dissolve a bit.

Add:

2 cups flour

Stir together, then use your hands to knead it together until it smooth and soft.  Add a bit more flour if it is too sticky.

This dough can be used lots of different ways, but most recently we have been rolling it out like cookie dough and using cookie cutters to make shapes that we bake until they are hard and then decorate with paint.

Make sure that if making ornaments, a hole is made so that a ribbon can be pulled through for hanging.  A straw works well for this.

The recipe I have says to bake at 200 degrees for 1-4 hours.  In our experience, it’s never baked enough after 1 hour and sometimes even needs a little longer than 4.  We usually turn the ornaments over every hour or so and then keep checking them to see when they are completely dry.  They can always be put back into the oven again later if some moist spots are still there when they cool.

When the ornaments are completely cool and dry, we painted them with a coat or two of white acrylic paint as a base coat.  When that is dry, paint as desired.

We used a version of this as an activity for 2 and 3 year olds at our church.  My daughter and I cut out star shapes and then found a bottle lid that was about 1 inch wide.  We pressed this into the center of the star to make a depression.

We then painted them with a base coat of white paint.  We then let the kids paint them with either gold or opal glitter glue ( or often, a mix of both:) ).  Ahead of time, we took pictures of the kids that we sized down to 1″ circles to fit the size of the inset.  We printed a couple of sheets of these at the photo shop of a local drugstore and then cut them out to be glued to the center of the circles.  We also made a few nativity image circles so that we would have choices for visitors that we hadn’t been able to photograph or for kids to use if they wanted to make several.  Here’s a blurred view of the 4 by 6 photo sheet:

The final result looks like this, although the shimmer of the opal glitter doesn’t show up well in this photo:

I first came up with these snowflake ornaments a few years ago for a homeschool Christmas craft day. A year or so later, I needed to come up with some ideas for ornaments to make for a Chrismon tree at our church, and realized that they work well for that, too. Chrismons are “Christ monograms” and in some way represent Christ. They are always to be handmade and the only colors used are white and gold. The “x” looks like the first Greek letter in “Christ” and the “I” symbol looks like the beginning Greek letter in “Jesus.” Thus, a common winter-y symbol also becomes a symbol of Christ. There are lots of sites all over the internet with more ideas for Chrismons as well as information about the history of this tradition.

This ornament is great for groups because even the very smallest children can make them. For the littlest ones, I put a line of glue across one section of the ornament at a time and the child fills it up with macaroni, beans, buttons or whatever we are using. Older kids and adults sometimes get very elaborate (and manage their own glue, of course!) and make balanced patterns using a variety of shapes. Everything ends up looking nice! My daughter has also made some that look very pretty by simply painting the white ornaments with glitter glue.

The first step is to drill a hole in the top of a popsicle stick. It really is best to do this first and not when you’ve finished painting, as popsicle sticks are not made from great quality wood and some of them will split when you drill the holes. You can imagine how I learned this and the number of base ornaments I had to re-make as my beautifully glued and painted ornaments split :).

Next, glue two sticks together to make and “x” shape. I use tacky glue for this and have found that the store brand works just as well as the name-brand kind.

Let this dry and then glue on the third stick, the one with the drilled hole.

When the glue has dried, I paint them all white. For big groups, I usually spread them all out in my carport and spray paint them. When dry, turn them over and paint the other side. Sometimes, they will need a couple of coats of paint. At home with my own kids or with a group who will have more than one day available to finish these, I’ve let the kids hand-paint these as part of the crafting experience. I have one child who has always really, really liked to paint, so, especially when she was younger, I looked for many opportunities like this for her.

Now comes the fun part- decorating! I have used all sorts of things- beans and noodles, sometimes painted gold or white, glittery sequins, buttons. It’s worked well for me to have kids work on a paper plate. Then, when finished, I move the ornament to a fresh paper plate or some other place to dry if the first plate got very glue-y. Also, I usually pull the ribbon or string that’s used for the hanger through the hole before decorating, just in case the hole gets covered up during the decorating.

I enjoyed stitching the stars featured in this earlier post:

http://hinzpired.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/card-stitching/ 

After playing with stitching them on paper, I decided that I wanted to try to adapt the idea to fiber.  For the images shown here, I used the same pattern as in my earlier post.  I poked holes through the pattern and then taped it to a piece of felt. I then used a fine-tipped sharpie marker to make dots on the felt through the holes.

I couldn’t get a good picture showing the dots on red felt, but here is a picture of the dots on a white background:

As I began stitching, I realized the felt needed to be more rigid, so I pinned a piece of non-fusible heavy weight interfacing to the felt.  This is very easy to stitch through and gave me the added  stability I was looking for (Timtex is one brand name for this sort of interfacing).

I then followed the stitching pattern in exactly the same way as I did for the card-stitched images.  I did knot the thread rather than taping it.

After I finished the stitching, I cut the felt into a circle, making a matching circle for the back.  I trimmed the interfacing a bit so that it wouldn’t show.  I then used my sewing machine and a zig-zag stitch to sew the two circles together.  I stitched a length of thread through to make a hanger to finish the ornament:

A few months ago, someone shared the link to stitchingcards.com with me. This company offers free patterns as well as patterns to purchase for stitching images on to cards. I liked the idea and started looking around on the internet for other string art patterns that I could use in the same way. I came across this scouting craft site: http://www.e-scoutcraft.com/string/star.html . I really liked the star and have used this pattern sized exactly as it appears on this site for the paper stitched stars shown above. I’ve also played with creating my own pattern in different sizes, with more dots, etc., using graph paper. (And a side note- I usually print out graph paper from this website: http://www.donnayoung.org/math/papers.htm)

Here are step-by-step instructions showing exactly how I used the e-scoutcraft star pattern to create an image stitched onto card stock.

Print out star image from e-scouting link listed above, or create your own. Tape lightly to a piece of card stock Re-positional tape would probably be a good idea, although I didn’t have any :).

Use a sewing needle or pin to poke holes through both pattern and cardstock. I placed my paper on a slightly firm couch pillow for this step.

Remove the paper pattern and then go back over the holes with the sewing needle you’ll be using, pushing it completely through to makes sure holes will be large enough.

Thread needle (I used crochet cotton as shown in the first picture-embroidery floss would probably also work)) and pull through the first hole as indicated in diagram. Tape thread end to back. Follow the thread pattern starting at hole one and moving to opposite side hole 6, then moving to hole two and stitching to opposite side hole 5 continuing until all holes in section are used. Here are some pictures illustrating this:

When complete the section it will look like this and you will then move on to the next set of holes and repeat the process until it is filled in.

Finish stitching the third set of holes in the same way. Your card will now look like this:

Now you will repeat the same stitches to fill in the open areas as shown here:

Continue stitching until all areas are filled in and tape thread to back to finish.

These stitched stars can then be used in many ways- add frames and make them into cards, ornaments or whatever else you can think of. I’ve come up with a version sewn onto felt that I’ll post about soon.

For part one,click here

After both sides are coated with glue, insert shorter piece inside longer piece. It should look like this:

Continue gluing remaining pieces:

Now, all of the pieces will be glued together. Apply glue to top of folded piece, as shown here:

Place next piece on top of glue. It should look like this:

Continue until all pieces have been glued together. Star should now look like this:

Now, apply glue as before and pull other side around to make a star shape. The star should now be completely formed as pictured here:

Make a hole in the top for hanging.  I used a hole punch:

Add some ribbon or thread for hanging and the star is finished!

I’ve enjoyed experimenting with different colors of paper, stamping on paper, adding words, etc. Try different numbers of segments, adding glitter or whatever else you can think of!