Origami Snowflake

Joyeux Noël!

These origami snowflakes make brilliant inexpensive Christmas ornaments – hang on Christmas trees, decorate on walls, windows, presents, greeting cards and anywhere you can imagine.

(adapted from Snowflake by creator Dennis Walker)

Step 1: Materials

1. 
   Any square paper / origami paper (1 paper makes 1 snowflake)
   
2. 
   Scissors
   

Step 2:

Fold the paper in half twice to get crease lines.

Step 3:

Fold one corner of the paper to the center.  Fold the top flap out towards the edge.  This will give you two additional crease lines.

Step 4:

Fold the paper in half again.  You should get something like the image on the left.  Using the two “X”s shown as points of reference, fold flap A behind (fold along the dotted line).  Turn over the paper and you should see something like image on right.

Step 5:

Fold flap B behind, aligning the blue and red edges. You should get a heart-like shape.

Step 6:

Cut along the blue line. Use the 2 “X”s as points of reference. We only want to keep the portion labelled A.

Step 7:

Fold an edge of the hexagon towards the center to make a crease line.  Repeat for all 6 edges.   At the end of the step, you will see many crease-formed triangles within the hexagon.

Step 8:

Fold an edge of the hexagon to the center again.  Using the crease lines formed in the Step 6, fold flap A to flap B (left image).  Perform the same fold pattern of folding flap A to flap B repeatedly (center image), until you get a pinwheel-like shape.  On the last flap, you may encounter a slight problem of the last flap being hidden under the folds.  Simply pull it out to get all 6 flaps sticking out (right image).

Step 9:

Squash fold each flap pocket (left image).  You should get something like the center image.  It doesn’t matter which flap goes on top, so your result may not look exactly like the image on the right.

Step 10:

On each of these flattened pockets, fold the two blue edges toward the center dotted line.  The purpose is to make crease lines for the next step.  You should get something like the image on the right.

Step 11:

Unfold the folds done in Step 9 to reveal the crease lines.  For each pocket, bring the blue “X” toward the red “X”.  The crease lines formed in Step 9 will help.  After completing all 6 pockets, the paper should look something like the image on the right.

Step 12:

Turn the paper over (left image).  Bring each pointed tip of the hexagon towards the center.  Ensure that each adjacent fold exposes a tiny flap.  Do not hide this flap beneath the fold.  You should get something like the image on the right.

Step 13:

Squash fold each of the tiny flaps.  The crease lines formed are meant to help in the next step.

Step 14:

Invert the folds done in Step 12, hiding the flaps neatly underneath.

Step 15:

Flip over. Bring each tip from the middle as far out as possible and make a fold.

At the end of the step, you should get 12 flaps – 6 big flaps, 6 small flaps.

Step 16:

Flip over.  In between any two big flaps is a small flap.  “Bring forward” each of the small flaps. Look closely at the left and center images as a guide.  At the end of the step, you should get 6 kite-like shapes (image on the right).

Step 17:

For each half of a “kite”, bring the blue edge to the center of the kite (dotted).  Squash-fold the pop-up towards the edge.  You should get something like the image on the right.  You need to perform this a total of 12 times.

You’re finally done! :)

Visit www.yokebakery.com for more recipes and craft tutorials! :)