Puffy stars - The eighth door

The things I'm doing for this advent calendar!
For years and years I have been resisting the beaded puffy stars, however pretty they may be, for several reasons.
While I have slowly begun to dip my toe into the waters of off-loom beading more and more (mostly because I still don't trust a certain tabby cat around my loom), I still consider myself to be quite the beginner and creating structural pieces is completely new to me.

Another reason is my lack of patience for video tutorials that are longer than five minutes (which says a lot more about me than about the tutorials!), but also knowing I wouldn't be able to make the stars without one.
Last but definitely not least these stars are made of five components. You know how much I struggle with even making a pair of identical earrings. FIVE identical components??
I know. I could make this much more interesting by going for a more complicated pattern. Excuse me while I am once again laughing madly.

For the sake of finding enough topics for this advent calendar, however, I jumped into the very cold water of puffy peyote stars after all, with two different randomly chosen tutorials, this one by Bronzepony Beaded Jewelry and this one by Off The Beaded Path.
My first attempt came out a little more squishy than intended, but is still pretty.

Then I almost lost my mind over my incredibly simple "pattern" of the first star I did in all-Delicas. I very quickly abandoned the idea of making these as Christmas gifts for our vet practice. Maybe for next year if I make one a month? ;-)

All in all, I'm happy that I tackled this personal challenge and got it out of my system for now.
It's crystal clear to me, however, that I will never make a star with a more complicated pattern or a much bigger star even if in a simple pattern. There are projects that are much more interesting to me.

Nevertheless, I could muster the patience for more than just two stars even if the only reason for that was a phase during which I seriously lacked the motivation to do much else. Stars to the rescue, who would have thought? I only played with colors and small sizes, however, not with patterns. Again, that will not ever happen.
So here's my little collection now. Some became gifts, some went into my decoration after I had taken the pictures for the first day of this calendar.

What became painfully obvious to me again, though, was that I obviously have no natural geometrical understanding at all! I guess my math teachers never stood a chance.