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A Holiday How-To:
Christmas-Saving Snowflakes

It's Christmas Eve Eve, everybody! I hope y'all are having a nice holiday season. But if you're not, it isn't too late! There's a simple thing you can do to save Christmas. It's easy:

Make some snowflakes.

Seriously! It really is that easy. After all, these very same snowflakes saved Christmas just a couple of years ago.

So you should make some! Dozens! Hundreds! Dozdreds!

Here, for the first time, is how to do it:

1. Take a square piece of paper. If yoiu don't have a suqare piece of paper then take a rectangular piece of paper and fold it diagonally from (any) one corner:

2. Cut off the dangly bits so that your paper is now a perfect triangle, and if you unfolded the triangle it would be a perfect square (but don't unfold it):

3. Fold this triangle in half but don't crease all the way up; just crease it a little bit right at the point of the fold to mark where the center point is in the triangle. Open it back up:

4. Now take your two side corners and fold them towards each other at exactly 60 degrees. If you're like me and you don't have a protractor (or are too lazy to use one), you just gotta kinda eyeball it. You're going to take both of the corners and fold them towards each other so that their edges line up; you're folding your paper into thirds:

5. When you do it right you should get this lovely symmetrical flower shape with no overhanging paper on the sides. Crease everything good. Now fold this shape in half lengthwise and crease that line:

6. Now you're going to cut off the top so that the top edges of all the layers of your paper are perfectly even:

7. Remember that the creased "spine" of your paper is going to be one of the six "points" of the snowflake, so it should really be the tallest part of your design. Now just start cutting out an interesting design:

8. Unfold it and voila! You have a snowflake that can save Christmas.

Some tips:

  • Cutting off the bottom point creates a hole in the center of the snowflake. Cutting it at an angle creates a spiky hole.
  • Remember that what you're seeing while you're cutting is only 1/12th of the entire, unfolded snowflake.
  • Don't be afraid to mix curves and angles and straight lines. You can get some really cool effects with both.

Here are some examples.

If you cut this...

You get this:

If you cut this:

You get this:

And if you cut this:

You get this:

There you have it! Wonderful and simple, you can crank out a whole bunch of these in just a short amount of time. You can do cool things with them, like tape them up in your windows, dangle them from the ceiling, or even get some nice decorative paper and frame them on your wall:


(photo courtesy the Unintentional Housewife)

The possibilites are endless-ish!

What do you think, Ocean Shores Pirate?

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