Flake Out

It was an exercise in listening. I was in Mrs. Broznec's third grade class and we were going through a step by step audio tutorial of how to make snowflakes. Good snowflakes. If I close my eyes I can still hear her voice taking us fold by fold. Years later I am cutting up the paper in the same way she taught us. I wonder what she would think if she knew that this is the lesson I remember so many years later. Math & Spelling? Bah Humbug! Snowflake making? Hooray! I haven't had a single residence- dorm room-bed room-living room who's windows weren't adorned with these paper versions of nature's cut ice. I give you the same tutorial, but lucky you- you get a visual...its so much easier that way. Start with just a piece of 8"x 11.5" paper - you can use larger if you want to make larger snowflakes, but this is how we will start.

Take bottom corner of paper and fold it to the top to make a triangle next to a rectangle.

Cut the rectangle off.

Leaving you with a square and a rectangle. Discard the rectangle.

Fold your square in half creating a new rectangle.

Fold your rectangle in half to make a square.

Using the diagonal crease in the paper as a guideline, fold the paper that has two edges just across the middle.

Fold the other side of the square to the edge, so that you are left with a kite shape.

Snip off the top so you are left with an ice-cream cone shape. (The more you cut off, or the closer to cut to the tip of "ice-cream cone" you go will make your snowflake smaller.)

Now you are ready to cut! The top of the triangle is the center of the snowflake, so if you snip it off, you will have a hole in the middle of your snowflake. (Little snip little hole, big snip big hole, no snip no hole....)

I like to cut a lot of the paper away. Just remember you must leave a piece of uncut paper on both sides of your triangle (it can be very tiny) or you will have nothing but very pretty scraps.

Snip snip, cut cut, la la la....

Unfold your creation carefully. Hello pretty snowflake!

Its a little addictive. Or maybe I'm just a little manic. At any rate, they do make your windows look festive- especially at night when the light shines through and casts their shadows on your curtains and walls.

Ezra is convinced that the snowflakes are magic. Once we put them up in our windows, it snows. We finished putting them up yesterday, and lo and behold...it snowed. He makes it so easy to believe.

The picture above is last night. Even if there wasn't enough snow outside, we've done a pretty good job getting it to snow inside. Oh, and thank you Mrs. B!

Don't forget to put your shoes out for Kris Kringle tomorrow night. You never know what he might slip into them to tease us about whats to come later- wooden shoes are nice, but not required...our Puma's and Chuck Taylor's seem to work just fine.

Happy weekend!