Sunday, December 27, 2015

Holiday Papercraft 2015

 Once again, I'd stumbled across a Pinterest pin and thought, "I could do that as a holiday gift."  So I went to the art store and used their paper-cutter to cut out some circles with three slots and various designs in them.

The designs I came up with were a snowflake, a double-star, a lightning star, six-hearts, and a Christmas tree,  I re-used old designs, too: the unicorn, and the partridge in a pear.
 Back home, I folded the circles and started assembling them into pentagons....
 ...because pentagons made out of equilateral triangles will make a kind of cone shape.
 The tricky part was arranging the triangles so that they had alternating colors and different designs.  The really big assemblies required glue along the tabs to keep them from falling apart.
 I used small clips to hold the tabs in place while the glue dried.
 In addition to previous years' unicorn and partridge, I designed some snow-flake like designs and an eight-fold sun shape.
 I wasn't exactly thinking through how many triangles I'd need.  I was thinking I would only need twelve, but that would be the case if the triangles were pentagons.  I ended up having to decide between a twenty-sided globe, an octahedron, or a tetrahedron.
In the end, I chose a tetrahedron:  it had a more stable base, was at a good scale as a table or mantle decoration, didn't require glue for construction, and created more finished products per sheet of paper.

I added an LED votive candle and an inner tetrahedron of parchment paper as a light defuser and my holiday gifts were complete.

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