Snowflakes- Giant Paper Snowflake

I feel like I should be done talking about Christmas stuff because we're only a few days away and you all have probably already done all of the crafty holiday stuff you wanted to do and now it's just the mad last minute scramble to get presents and food and whatever else ready on time. My husband does all of our shopping on Amazon nowadays so I don't have to worry about the big stuff but we still have to get all of those little things that you can't get online. So while my mind is turning away from Christmas, I'm still very much in a winter mindset. Which is why I wanted to make this week all about snowflakes.

We've all made paper snowflakes at one point in our lives. It's a standard kids school project that almost always produces fun results. I have seen many intricate methods for cutting and folding paper to create beautiful designs. One of the more complicated looking ones was this giant snowflake. The diagram looks simple enough, but the final results have me wondering if the diagram is as simple as it seems.

Supplies:

-Six sheets of paper, I used colored cardstock paper

-Scissors

-Scotch tape

I have some beautiful marbled cardstock paper, which is slightly thicker than standard paper, and I really wanted to use it for this project for a few reasons. Mostly just because I like it and it meant that I got to make a rainbow, but also because the colors show more contrast for pictures and I was curious to see if the thicker paper would make a good snowflake.

Following the diagram, I cut my paper into a square, then folded it in half diagonally twice. At this point on a few of the papers I noticed small tears on the edges, but it was just barely noticeable. After the second fold, I made three horizontal cuts from the outside to the middle.

I then fully unfolded my paper and began to work on the folds. I say this for lack of a better word because there are no actual folds in this part, but it is the part that makes the pattern. Starting with the center section, I rolled them over each other and taped them together. Then I flipped it over and rolled the next smallest over on each other and taped them together as well. Repeated until each section was taped. This entire pattern was repeated until I had six sections of my snowflake.

So, I had all of my pieces assembled with only minor tears but until this point it was as simple as I had first thought. Getting the pieces to stick to each other was more difficult. I don't have a stapler at the moment so I had to try to get it to stay exclusively with tape. I taped at the ends, then again in two different spots on the sides. At that point it was finally secure enough for me to pick up and hang up on the wall.

This thing is huge. Seriously, it's almost three feet tall. The thicker paper does make the snowflake heavier and more difficult to hang, but the colors more than make up for it. There were a few small rips but nothing that messed with the structural integrity. I'm tempted to hang this up either in a window or just in my daughter's room. Either way this was fun and it really was as easy as it appeared in the diagram.