snowflake tutorial

"Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man."
~Orison Swett Marden

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Today my friend, Natalie, showed me how to make the coolest 3-D snowflake out of paper!

It looks incredibly complex and intricate, but it's SOOO simple to make, so I just had to share with you!

First gather your equipment
a pair of scissors, 6 pieces of paper, tape and/or a stapler.

Start with a square piece of paper.
Since I used regular copy paper, I had to turn it into a square.
Fold the square in half diagonally to form a triangle.

Then fold the triangle in half to form a smaller triangle.


Cut 4 diagonal slits along the bottom folded edge almost to the side folded edge (I stopped about a quarter of an inch away). They should be fairly evenly spaced. I just eyeballed mine but I've drawn lines here to illustrate where you should cut. Then it occurred to me if you were doing this with kids you could draw the lines on with pencil for them so that they could cut them themselves (with safety scissors and adult supervision of course!) Make sure you don't cut the slits all the way through, stop short of the other side.




After you've cut the slits, carefully open your square up. You should see a pattern of nested diamonds like this:


Next, you're going to connect the points of the diamonds starting with the inner most and working your way out, alternating sides. Here I've labeled the points to illustrate.

Fold points A together and tape or staple them, like so:

Then flip your square over and fold points B together and connect.

Flip the square back over to the front and fold points C together and continue connecting the points alternating sides

until you have a figure that looks like this:

Repeat these steps with the other 5 pieces of paper so that ultimately you have 6 sections.

Attach the 6 sections together at the sides to form a chain. Again you could staple, tape, or even glue them, but I found stapling to be easiest.

You *could* stop here and you'd have a really cool garland, especially if you used some colored paper,but for a snowflake you have to keep going!

Wrap your chain around to form a circle and attach the 1st and 6th sections together at the sides.

Finally, connect the points in the center


and you have your snowflake! Punch a hole in one of the points, tie on some ribbon, and hang it up for all to enjoy!




How cool would it be to make all different sizes, hang them from the ceiling and have your very own snowstorm! I'm telling you, the picture doesn't do it justice. You HAVE to make one and see for yourself how amazing these are!