Omg guys, it’s really here now – blogmas has started!!! I’m beyond excited and can’t wait to share all my thoughts and ideas for the Christmas season with you! Today, this is a first Christmas craft – how to create these pretty folded stars!
It might look a bit complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really very easy and you won’t even need the instructions anymore! So just try it a few times and follow the instructions picture by picture, and you’ll be fine. Don’t let yourself get discouraged when it doesn’t work out right away – it didn’t work out for me either, but now I can make the prettiest stars out of just 4 strips of paper! And you can do the same! So here we go:
What you’ll need:
- 4 strips of paper (colour and thickness of your choice, but it shouldn’t be too thick or else it will be too hard to fold); size: 44 cm (17 inches) / 2 cm (0,8 inches)
And that is all! You can now start crafting! Here we go, step by step (if you can’t follow my own pictures, you can scroll to the bottom, where I have an illustration for you):
These are the paper strips I used. They are brown, a glittery gold and a shiny gold colour, but you can use whatever you like. I just find that when you use different colours it looks nicer than just in one, but this is totally up to you.
1. What you’ll do is fold each strip in half, and fold them into each other. So the brown one on top incorporates the brown one on the bottom right, and goes into the glittery silver one on top. Same with the shiny silver one on the top right: it incorporates the glittery gold one on the top left, and goes into the brown strip on the bottom right corner. Might sound complicated, but have a close look at the picture, and you’ll get it!
2. The next step is to fold one of each strips over to the other side (remember you folded the long strip in half at the beginning, so you have two strips over each other now), so that you have two strips of paper next to each other on each side instead of one.
3. Now this might be a little complicated at first, but you’ll get it once you’ve tried it a couple of times! Instead of just folding each strip over to the other side as you did in step 2, you now interlink them all together: take the bottom right shiny strip in the picture: you put the brown one on the bottem left under the silvery strip, and pull the bottom right glittery one over it and into the brown one. They should all be interlaced now, as in this picture:
4. Flatten the strips a bit so that they stay put like this, but not too much, so that the star still looks voluminous in the end.
5. Now you take one of the strips (the right on each side) and fold it into a triangle BEHIND the strip itself. This is probably the most important part: BEHIND the strip.
6. From the side you made a triangle, you now make a loop and fold the strip into the loop on the other side. The result should look like this: you have a folded triangle on one of the right sides.
7. You repeat the same step on all of the sides (always with the strip on the right).
8. This is just a repetition of the previous steps. Make a loop of the triangle strip and put it under the looped strip on the side.
9. You now have two triangles and repeat the steps until you have four. 
10. You now have 4 double strips of paper and 4 folded paper triangles.
11. You now turn the star (we can already call it that, can’t we?) over. With one of the paper strips (now on the right side next to the triangle) you do the same as on the first side (see step 5): fold the strip behind and create a triangle. Make a loop and put it under the loop that bridges the strips on the opposite side, so that you have one triangle and the rest of the paper strips fold under the opposite side of the triangle.
12. Repeat this step with each four sides like so:
13. Now you repeat the same step you did on the outsides on the inside of the star: you fold a tringle (behind the paper strip), make a loop and push it under the bridge on the other side:
14: You should now have a double triangle in the middle like this:
15. You now repeat this step on each side, until you have four triangles in the middle of the star. You can now work with the remaining strips of paper on the outside by just repeating the steps as before:
16. Once you have created triangles on the outsides as well, the strips of paper you push under the paper bridges in the middle will start to become too short to repeat the steps. You can then just cut the remaining bits off.
And voila: Your folded paper star is finished and should look somewhat like this:
I wish I could say this was easy, but a tutorial with 16 steps probably can’t claim that of itself… But at least it’s pretty, isn’t it? You can make a few of them and hang them on a ribbon to create a garland, or you could use them to decorate your gifts. Or whatever you like! If my pictures were too hard to follow along, here is an illustration I found. Not sure if it makes things better though… 😀
Let me know what you think!
Lots of love and happy Christmas season,
Noly
