Make Christmas Stars: Five ways with paper

1. Introduction : Welcome to Christmas Stars Five Ways. We've got a wonderful selection of stars for you. Here's an example of one of them. And also these wonderful little Scandinavian stars. So join the class to do those two and three more other designs. See you in 2. Your Project: So project is to make one of the five stars and take a photo and upload it to the gallery. Have fun. 3. Stunning Hanging Star: In this lesson, we are going to make this star. We are going to need six squares of paper. Mine are 21 centimeters by 21 centimeters. First stage is to fold corner to corner. Now I'm making lines 2 centimeters apart, 2 centimeters from the edge and 2 centimeters from the previous line. I'm making these fairly roughly where I start and end because the important thing you see when I make these next set of lines on the other edge are that the lines don't meet because we're going to cut along those lines. If the lines meet, then that section will just fall out. Now I'm going to start cutting along these lines. But the important thing is, as I said, the lines don't need in the center, you imagine that center line and a little bit of distance either side, don't cut up to the center. Otherwise, it really doesn't have to be that precise. Okay. Turn it round to cut the other side. But this is where we make sure we leave a gap. That's the cutting stage. Open out your square, and now we're going to make the folds. The first one, you take the middle corners the corners of the middle square, and we're going to attach them. Now, you'll see that I am using a stapler because when you do it, you'll see that really wants to spring back and you can use selltape. You can use glue, but my experience is that you need quite strong glue or setape to keep it together because it does want to spring open. Turn over and take in the next set of triangles. And fix those together. Blue dots could work because they're quite strong. Notice I haven't got it quite symmetrical there, but that won't matter in the whole star. Turning over, picking up the next set of triangles, stapling those. Turnover for the last time, take the outer triangles and fix those together. Now you have one unit. Remember you have six squares and this is one unit and you need to do that five more times. An important thing to realize is that there is an orientation with these. Those are not the same way around. If you look at that middle section, now, these are the correct way round, so you need to put them all facing the same way. This is what they look like when you've laid out all six, all facing the same way. It's going to be fixed in the middle and at six points around the edge. I found the best way to fix the middle is to take three at a time. I staple three together, then staple the other three together. Then staple the two sides of three together. And I put two staples in there because that's quite an important section. Now we're going to put the sides together. We staple that and we need to do it for each of the other five sections as well. When you've done all five, it looks like this and you can hang it up by a thread, and it looks great. 4. Origami Star: In this lesson, we're going to make a star of this design. You need 15 squares of paper. My squares are 7 centimeters by 7 centimeters, but you can try with different sizes. I've decided to show you the unit fold with a bigger piece of paper here so that it might be clearer. So fold to the center, fold point to point across the center, take a corner to the middle and repeat this three more times. Now fold one edge up to the center and repeat that on the other side to make a kite shape. I'm now going to turn this over and fold that triangle at the bottom up so that it matches the edge on the other side. And the last step is to turn it over and fold in half. So you're going to do 14 more of those. So the important thing to realize is when you make that fold, you get these little pockets, and that's how the units are going to connect together. So I'm back to my red. I'll just do the fold one more time for you as a quick reminder. But you need to do this for 15 squares of the same size. The paper could be plain or patterns and try out different sizes. I wouldn't go much smaller than the 7 centimeters because you can see that the folding is getting a little bit more fiddly with this smaller size. You do need to make sure that all the creases are really well made. So here we go fitting in two units together. And we just need to follow that round, keep going, adding more units until here I'm at the very last one. So putting in the wings of one side into those pockets of the other, of course, they have to be the same way around. And what happens is just when you think that you've completed it breaks somewhere else. And so you have to keep putting it together. And I would say, if that keeps happening, resort to glue to stick it, and then just keep adjusting it so that everything's evenly spaced out. You can see that some of my points here are a bit close together, so I'm opening those out and just keep adjusting it until you're happy with the result. And as I say, you can resort to glue to keep them together if they keep falling apart. And 5. Eight Pointed Star: In this lesson, we're going to make an eight pointed star like this one. So I've made a circle that's 4 centimeters and I'm just drawing some lines in half and then quarters. I'm really not measuring. I'm just doing it by I. Now I'm going to cut back in half, and we're making the foundations of our eight pointed star. There is another little stage here, though. We need to add some shorter lines dividing each of those sections in half. So that we end up with 16 segments in the circle. So now we're going to do the points. Those are going to be 6 centimeters from the center. So my lines weren't quite long enough, so I'm just extending those lines so that I can make the points 6 centimeters. So the next stage is to join up the end of that line that's 6 centimeters to the edge of the circle to the short line on either side. And we're going to go round and do that for all eight points. And then when that's been done, we want to cut the star out. And it will look like this. So now we need a tool for scoring the lines. I'm going to use an embossing tool, the very small point, but you can just use the edge of a pair of scissors or any blunt tool that you can find, blunt pointed tool. So we're scoring along the short lines and the long lines. I'm only doing one side at a time because I've got quite a short ruler, but if you had a longer ruler, you could go all the way across. When it's finally scored, it looks like this. I'm going to turn it over. Ignore my pencil lines where I did a wrong circle on the other side. I'll rub those out later. And then we're going to fold the long lines to the middle of the points of the star all in that same direction. So make sure those creases are really well pushed down and take care of the points at the ends when you get there. So we need to do that four times to cover each of the eight points. So the short lines that we've scored are going to fold in the opposite direction. And we're going to do that by pinching together those points, and that will enable that short fold to go the other way. And this is a bit fiddly, and it just takes a while to go round and re go over the different folds to get it to go the way you want it to go. So you can make this star in gold for the top of a Christmas tree, add some glitter. Try it in different sizes as well. So I'm really trying to go over these creases just to make sure that they're really well pressed down and try to take care of the ends, you can see one of mine there has got a little bit bent. And that's the finished star. 6. Scandinavian Star: In this lesson, we're going to make stars like these, known as Scandinavian stars or Danish stars or Frobll stars. You need long thin strips. My strips are 2 centimeters wide and about 50 centimeters long. They need to be about 20 times the width. We start by folding them in half. So there'll be a lot of threading through, weaving strips in and out. And by cutting these ends off at a slight taper, we're just making it easier to thread the strips through. He so this is the first stage is to make a cross. So we're putting the whole strip through the loop and just make sure that that one's pointing downwards where the first white one was pointing upwards. We've got one red one pointing to the right, and this red one that's pointing to the left is going through that hoop. And now we just pull on each of the ends and just tighten it up to make that kind of cross weave shape in the middle. In this next stage, we stabilize the cross. Now, make sure you follow exactly the order, not that one. It's got to be this red one. Otherwise, when you get to the fourth one, you won't have a loop to tuck it under. So this fourth one's going across and under the loop made by the first one. So that's the base for starting to make the points. So the first set of points, there'll be eight points altogether, four on each side, and we're going to fold to make a triangle away from us, now fold on top to make an arrowhead and fold back on itself. So we're now going to thread it. This is tricky. Thread it through the loop that's just there right next to it. Pull it through and press it down. Now, make sure you turn the same way that I've turned. Otherwise, you could get in a muddle. So turning away, making a triangle, back on yourself to make the arrowhead. And and turning up. Now, you may have noticed there that one of my white strips were joined. In fact, all my strips are joined because it's quite hard to get paper that's as long as you need. You can buy special strips for this, but I've cut my own, and where it was joined, can you see the problem that it's causing in threading through. But I've persevered, worked around it, and just tried to rescue it there. So doing the third one With the last one, you will need to move that red strip out of the way before you tuck it in to find the little loop. Again, a bit of trouble where there was a drain in the paper. So those four flaps at the top are going to make the pointed out raised stars, but we're going to turn over and make the rest of the points. So pay attention to the direction that they're going in. They need to be the opposite direction to the ones around them, not the same. If you make a few of these, you will really get used to the procedure. So all the eight points are done. Now we need to do the points that are raised. So what I'm going to do is put a little dot on the ends of my strips for the ones that are going to make the raised points on this side, and then turnover Okay. I'm not going to turn over. I'm going to do that later. So I'm going to take this strip, and I'm going to twist it so that the left side goes under. And then it's going to need another twist so that the side with the dot is on top, not that way round. So the side with the dot, that's why we put the dot there to help us to not get that wrong. And pull and sometimes it's easier to pull from a different angle and create that point. So you need to help it along, give it a little pinch, push it in and you've got that raised point. Now, I managed to not video the rest of that star, so I'm back at the same point here with another star. So this is the one I've just done. And you can see sometimes it doesn't thread through easily. Cut off the bits that are causing problem. So this is exactly the same as I just did in the last one. Now, it's really important that you notice when I do the next one, I'm turning it anticlockwise. That will make quite a lot of difference. There's the blob, left side, left edge under, and bring it round so that the dots on top. This one's not going through so easily because of the join in the paper. But if you keep at it, it gets there in the end. Anticlockwise, left ed under. I put the white one out of the way first, then pick up the blue one, left ed under. It's easy to get confused at that point when that white one's flapping in the way, but just move it out of the way. Anticlockwise, and the last one on this side. That one's tricky because of the join in the paper. But could have cut that little bit off, but I've just pressed it down. So at this stage, I like to cut off those pieces that we've just threaded through so that they're not in the way when we turn over and do the remaining four points. Okay. So we're going to turn over and repeat that. It's exactly the same. So I'm going to speed up the video from here. Okay. I love it. And 7. Folded Star: So in this lesson, we're making little stars like this. These stars, like the last lesson, are made with long strips. My strip here is 2 centimeters and about 40 centimeters in length. The first fold is at an angle. And the second fold, you'll see that I'm going to take quite a long time to get this right because what I'm trying to do is create a second fold whereby the length of that second edge is exactly the same as the edge I've created the first edge when I folded it. So if I measure it, that first fold, it's about 21 millimeters or 22 millimeters. And so I want to fold it at that point. So I was about right where I had it and then fold it across so that it goes through the other point on the other side. So then we turn over and we line up the left edge with the edge that's already there. Oh you see that edge is lined up. So turnover. And now line up the left edge with the opposite point, turnover again, line up the left edge with the edge of the Pentagon, turnover and line it up with the opposite point. Line it up with the left edge. Now the next move where I've been describing it as turnover with the opposite point. Okay. You could think of it as lining up the right edge with the edge of the pentagon. So keep doing this. When you've got the shape in your hands, it kind of naturally goes where you need it to go until you get to the end of your strip, and at the end of your strip, you can just tuck in the end. Going to cut it off so that it will fit under. And now here's the tricky part. We're going to press on the edges really hard to create that star shape by puffing up our little set of strips, and it's hard to do at first. And I decided that I didn't like it, and I decided to flatten it out again and try again. So that's always an option. It could be that I made my strip too long. You have to experiment. I flattened it again. I'm gonna have one more go at pushing those edges in. And these tend to work better with smaller stars than really big strips. And press on the points to kind of shape them. And I've decided that's the best I'm going to get, and it's okay. And here are the other ones that I made earlier of different sizes.