Snowflake Tutorial

A beautiful Christmas decoration is paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling on nylon thread. For what seems like all my life, we've hung snowflakes to the ceiling every year and taken them down when winter is over.

However, these snowflakes were made mostly by small children who weren't particularly gifted with scissors, so the snowflakes weren't very pretty. A few years ago, my talented sister Mary Margaret discovered a snowflake formula that never fails. Last night, we had a snowflake making party, and we're going to replace almost all of our old snowflakes (which are by now yellow with age as well as inartistic) with new pretty ones.

I was inspired by our party to do a tutorial for a perfect snowflake, so this afternoon I set out with paper and scissors and a camera and got cutting.

What you need is a piece of A4 paper and a pair of ordinary kitchen scissors. 

 Fold the paper like so and cut off that chunk at the top so you have a triangle that's folded in half...

 Then fold that triangle in half.

 Now you have to fold it into thirds. Just make an estimation and fold both sides in so one is on top of the other and it's more or less folded in thirds. You want to make it as exact as you can.

 There you see, you've just got a couple of things sticking up and once you chop those off you have a triangle that's folded into thirds.

 See?

 Now it's time to get out of the origami stage and onto the snowflake stage. I drew some shapes on my triangle and shaded in what I was going to cut out so you could see, but you don't have to do that, I usually just wing it. You want to cut out blobs that have no specific shapes. And don't forget to give your snowflake a decorative edge by cutting the top of the triangle fancily. The trick is, you don't want it to look beautiful when it just has the blobs cut out of it, you want it to look boring. You also want to leave as little paper as possible. but don't cut out the center or it'll just sort of flop about and not be too snowflake like.

 And then you open it up and....

 You have a beautiful snowflake! yep, that gorgeous piece came from that boring little triangle. It's a lot of fun to unfold them and see what you've created.
Here are some of the ones I did last night:

 I couldn't resist doing a nerdy one. This one isn't particularly pretty but it does have little Tardis' all around the edge so it's awesome.

Have fun making snowflakes!