Paper Snowflakes

Celebrating the holidays with my little family brings me so much joy! This year, I feel Emma’s excitement for it more than ever now that she’s five (and a half, ☺️). I brought out the Christmas decor earlier than normal this year and I’m not even sorry. It makes me so happy.

Now that she’s older I get to include her in lots of the decorating and fun DIY crafts that I otherwise would have done by myself. This year, I decided a cool fun thing to do together was make snowflakes. She’s into cutting paper a whole lot lately so I knew she’d love to participate in this activity.

The thing about me is, when I get an idea to do something, I want to do it then and there! I get the itch and the ideas start popping in my head and I’m not satisfied until at least we’ve tried it. Even though I improvised with the type of paper I had for this activity, I think it came out pretty darn good and the effect I was going for was accomplished.

I’m no expert, and I’m sure there is a specific art to making intricate beautiful snowflakes, however, since I did this with my 5 year old, I was okay with it not looking so perfect. So if you’re a beginner like me, and want to learn how to create simple, fun and easy snowflakes, keep reading.

You’ll need:

• Square paper, ( more on this later)
• Scissors
• Pencil

The first thing you’ll need is squared paper. I know some people use thin white paper, but I just used what I had. I, of course didn’t have square paper; I had 8″x10″ printer paper that I cut into a square. Doing this actually worked out because you have to fold the paper into a triangle anyway for step one. Once you have your triangle, fold it again to make another triangle, but this time don’t press down on the edge all the way. Just sorta pinch it at the bottom so you can see where your next starting point will be.

Next, what I did was place my index finger on the bottom folded edge and grabbed the outer edge of the triangle and folded it in a third going upward, (see image below).

Turn the paper around, and do the same thing to the other side, making sure to line up the sides evenly.

Finally, I folded it one last time and matched up the edges to create a type of cone shape outline triangle. Cut off the extra pointy sides at the bottom to create a semi symmetrical triangle.

Here comes the fun part, sketching your design to cut out. Emma didn’t want to sketch hers out, she just wanted to free hand cut. She’s so brave; I had to sketch mine out first. So while Emma started cutting away I sketched up a few patterns I found online and did a few of my own designs as well. At this point, I found that almost every design worked!

Here are a few of my sketches that I did. You can always just make it up as you go. The possibilities are really endless.

 

Emma had a little trouble at first because she was discouraged that her cuts were not all alike. I told her that no two snowflakes are exactly alike, so creating different ones and cutting them not so perfect was okay! I could tell that this really got to her on a deeper level because after I told her that, she no longer was concerned with it being perfect. She kept cutting away and unraveling her snowflakes and every time she did, she’d say something like, “look it mommy, wow!” We had a blast making them and I know this will become a new tradition. I can’t wait until Christian can join in on the fun.

Her favorite thing to do besides the cutting was sticking the tape on them and hanging them up for display. I’ll be doing a few other DIY crafts for Christmas so I might show how I do those in the future. For now, we’ll enjoy our hot cocoa, stare at these snowflakes and pretend like it’s going to be a white Christmas in sunny California ❄️

Xoxo,

Reyna ❤️