Paper snowflake

Paper snowflakes – Christmas Crafts

Paper snowflake
Last year I went on a short course at our Children’s Centres to make things for Christmas.  I had no idea what I’d be making but wanted to try something new.  One session was spent on decorations and these paper snowflakes were my favourite.  They are really easy to make too.  I can’t credit a source as I don’t actually know where the information came from.

Start with a piece of A4 paper and cut 12 strips with a width of 0.7cms (you want the strips to be of the shorter length of the paper – so 21cms) When I did the course we used a length of 15cms, so you can adapt to suit.

paper snowflakesThen take 2 of the strips and fold them in half.  This is so you can see where the centre of each strip is. Take one of the folded strips and place it vertically flat, then glue (glue stick is fine) a small patch at the centre of the strip.  Lay the other strip across the first strip ar right angles to glue them together.

paper snowflakes paper snowflakes

Glue two small patches of glue on the horizontal strip either side of the vertical strip.  Taking two more strips, place one vertically to the side of the first strip and one on the other side of the now central strip.

paper snowflakesPlace two small patches of glue onto the two outside strips, either side of the horizontal strip (four bits of glue in total).

Place two more strips horizontally, one above and one below the existing horizontal strip, so that they weave over and under the strips that are already there. These will be held down with the patches just glued like so ….

paper snowflakesTurn over the ‘mat’ you have just woven, then put glue on the tips of the strips and fix like shown in the photo below until you have 4 loops.  The loops MUST face upwards or it will not work when you construct the finished snowflake. Put this section aside, and repeat process with remaining 6 strips.

paper snowflakes paper snowflakes

When you have two halves completed you want one half with loops facing upwards, place the other half on top with loops facing downwards but turn 45 degrees to create the snowflake effect. The loops on one half should line up with the strips on the other half.

Put glue on the inside tip of one of the loops and then feed the strip through that loop  and stick it to the glue.  The strip should extend a little beyond the end of the loop.  Repeat this process with all of the other pairs of loops and strips.

You now have your paper snowflake.

Paper snowflake

On the course they told us to trim the ends of the strips off, but I like them like this, I think it makes them look like snowflakes.  You can also thread some cotton through one of the strips to hang your paper snowflakes up.  I use blu-tack to stick them to our windows.

I have tried it with some sparkly paper strips I found in Poundland a couple of weeks ago but I’ve struggled to get the paper snowflakes to stay stuck!  But they do look pretty so I’m going to try stronger glue.

paper snowflakes paper snowflakes

Really easy, once you’ve got the nack you can make them in 5 minutes.  Hope you enjoy my Christmas Crafts!  You can find more ideas here.

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Easy Paper Snowflakes for Christmas

 

18 thoughts on “Paper snowflakes – Christmas Crafts

  1. Wow, those are lovely. Very clever. I remember we just used to fold up some white crepe paper and start cutting LOL

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