Paper Snowflakes

Warning: this one is picture heavy.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I enjoy making paper snowflakes.  I’ve made some more.  Or I tried to at least.

I gathered a bunch of pretty origami paper, folded them and drew on some designs from some images I found on Pinterest.

Then I cut them out, and unfolded them.

Yeah.  I messed up.  The only one that turned out okay was this one, which is the bottom centre row in the folded cut picture.

It took me a while to figure out where I’d gone wrong.  I missed a fold.  You fold the square in half, then in half again, and then in thirds.  I’d missed that second half.

So I got some more paper and folded it properly.

Then I drew a design from another Pinterest image.

That little triangle at nearly the tip – that you can’t reach from the side with scissors – I tried cutting that with a craft knife and failed.  So I just cut out a whole wedge.

And then while cutting the rest of the design I screwed it up.  I cut too far.

I did the same thing to three more snowflakes before I got frustrated and took a Pringles break.

Then I had another go with the design from the Frozen image, but without drawing it out first, just improvising.  It came out not looking too bad.

I tried one completely improvised, which looked a little dodgy.

So then I went back to the first Pinterest image I was working from.

I tried the top one first.  It came out looking a lot more solid than the result in the image.

It’s a very low quality image, and you can’t zoom in very far.  I suspect I was missing a bit of the design.

I had a go at the second design, and clipped a bit off the point as well.  This one came out really nice, but I didn’t quite get the border right.

I had run out of the paper that I’d gathered at this point, so I reached for a sheet of good old printer paper, which works really well for these.

Unfortunately that was my last sheet of printer paper.  I do have about seven million origami papers though.  I got out my box of papers, went through them all selecting ones I thought would make great snowflakes, and folded them without really paying attention to how many I was making.  I got carried away – surprise surprise.  There are over 60 of them.

I will probably save some for next year.  Maybe.

First I wanted to retry the snowflakes from the post the other day, with the correct number of folds.  Here’s how they looked before.

I drew out the first one, started cutting and found myself really struggling to get this little notch here, so I just chopped it off.  And then when I was cutting further down the pattern I accidentally lopped a bit off.  Then I didn’t even try getting that section out of the point, so I snipped off the tip to give it a centre hole.

So what I ended up with was nothing like the first one really.  But it made a fairly decent snowflake in the end.

The second one lost some limbs too.  I really suck at this.

I think these ones actually looked better the first time round.  But there you go.  I was getting a bit disheartened here, so I went for something simpler.  I went back to that blue reference image, and tried the second one again.  And it’s so pretty!

I did the bottom design on the blue reference image, and that was pretty too.

I even did a small snowflake.  Not that you can tell because there’s nothing in these images to indicate scale.  But the rest of the snowflakes have been 6×6 inch origami paper.  This one is a 3×3 inch piece, with an improvised design.

I found another reference image from Pinterest and did a couple of those.

Then I found yet another reference image – the internet has MILLIONS of these things.

I did the first one from that image, and the third one.  Both pretty, but I think I prefer the first one.

After that… well after that I got distracted by a Christmas movie and just kept improvising some.

There are some really dodgy looking snowflakes in there, but there are some that are freaking awesome too.  I selected out some of my favourites and ironed them briefly to get them to lay flat.  Tomorrow I’ll get them stuck up onto my walls somewhere 🙂

Phew!  That’s a lot of snowflakes.  I’d say that it’s the last of them, but there are more snowflakes coming in a few days – this time with a different medium though.