Although this is the fourteenth door, it was one of my last projects for this advent calendar.
I desperately needed something quick and easy for a change. One minute paper stars by Auermedia Arts & Crafts. Now if that didn't sound good, I didn't know what did!
Of course I knew before it was mentioned in the video tutorial that my first star wouldn't be finished in one minute. Or the second. Or the eighteenth if I should ever get that far. It was okay, I was more than ready to put as much as five minutes in per star! ;-)
To make sure I would get at least one good star for this post, I recruited my personal crafts expert, my sister. I packed my little bag with gold and silver paper cardstock (which it was called when I ordered it, to me it looks more like yellow and grey, shimmering, but not gold and silver, sigh) and heigh-ho, off I went for a little Christmas crafty session.
Our last star crafting had been years ago, using black cardstock that we cut and onto which we then glued bits of colorful transparent paper. The ones my sister made were beautiful, mine were, well, okay, but all of them were used in decorating some of the windows at my job for many years until the tips looked like chewed from all the taping and taking off again, so that session had been time well spent.
I hoped that would be the case again this time.
It was so funny. We both folded the star rather quickly and then cut a part off like instructed. I "opened" what I still had in my hand. Oh no, it all fell apart, total disaster! Until my sister said ... "Wait, the part you put away is the star, you are holding the waste."
Told you I needed her, I don't think I would have noticed, lol!
And to be fair, it was a lot more waste than star which I hadn't expected.
My first star was really crooked. Maybe I hadn't folded it carefully enough, maybe the measurements had been slightly off. Also it almost seemed that the cardstock was a bit too heavy to get that crisp center point done right.
Time for another attempt.
It wasn't too bad, but it wasn't too exciting, either. The center point was a little off, but better than the last. The rays weren't all the same length. The cut edges were a bit ragged which I blame on the folded up cardstock being a tad too thick for my scissors.
I had three options, use thinner paper, get bigger scissors, or let this be a lonely star. I opted for the last one, but thought the lonely star called for some embellishment at least.
First I added some "gold" leaf (you will read more about my first attempt with that in a few days). The cardstock sucked up the gilding milk like der Dekan his kibbles, so I threw on the leaf quite randomly as I had planned to add more, anyway.
Let's stop this here. I didn't like the gold leaf, I didn't like the beads I used next, I hated the whole star and very spontaneously threw it away - before even taking a picture of it. That may give you an idea of how unhappy I was with it.
Now what?
I remembered having some ordinary grey wrapping paper with white snowflakes from years ago - I'm not a gift wrapper - that would probably be too thin, though.
It was. The folding was easier and more regular, but all the folds lost their grey. I tried to cover it a bit with a metallic silver pen and ended up making the whole star silver, actually just so I can show you something at all.
As you can see, the silver is drawn on quite randomly and you see some of the original white snowflakes peeking through (that has to do with the paper's surface), I couldn't do any better and, to be honest, I didn't have any patience left at that point.
In a last minute decision, I glued it to a base - leftover cardstock - that I cut afterwards, so you can see tiny bits of "gold" around the edges. The star is (rather) symmetrical, by the way, it just doesn't look like it because of the angle I took the photo from.
So what have I learned from this one?
These are pretty stars, but I would probably need the perfect paper or cardstock to make them look nice. And a miracle. Or a lot more than one minute.Sometimes
the truth is hard to take, but I realized that my career is not
in origami if I am even struggling with an easy folded star ;-)
I also had to think of my mother who constantly expressed her surprise about my patience with some things and none whatsoever with others. The star is definitely among the latter!
If you are up to trying these, I would love to see pictures :-)
