Sunday, December 21, 2008

Hand Made Christmas - Star Mobile

I made this 3-D star mobile for my 4 year old nephew for Christmas. The colors match his room perfectly. My camera is not functioning properly so the photos don't do it justice. Here is how to make one:
Tools and Materials:
Scotch Tape
2 Large sheets (18 X 18" or more) of bristol paper or cardstock
2 Large sheets of decorative print paper (wrapping paper or decopage sheets work well)
Several sheets of coordinating card stock for stars
Exacto knife and several fresh blades
Stylus/burnisher
Self Healing cutting mat
metal ruler or large C-thru triangle
Double sided tape
Spray mount adhesive
push pin
sring or wire
embellishments (optional)
pop dots (optional)
  1. Click here to go to Lost Button Studios to download a template for the star. I opened the template in Photoshop and cropped off everything but the star, then saved it again as a PDF. The reason for doing this is because in Adobe Acrobat Professional, you can print in tiles. I don't know if regular Acrobat lets you do this. If not you can go to the Adobe site and download a free 30 day trial. To print tiles in acrobat, go to the file menu and select print.
  2. On the Page Scaling drop down menu, select "tile all pages" and increase the size to 165 %, then hit print
  3. The template will print on 4 sheets of paper. Line up the edges of the diagram and tape the pages together to make a large template.
  4. Now draw flaps off of each edge of the star so that it looks like the diagram below (the blue sections are flaps). You will need the flaps to attach the front and back piece together. You will score on the lines that were the original boarders so that the flaps will fold in.:
  5. Remove some of the adhesive off of strips of masking tape by sticking it to your clothes and peeling off, then use it to tape the template over 2 sheets of 18 x 24" Bristol paper or card stock (Martha Stewart sells large sheets of 18 x 18" by the page). Make sure your paper sandwich is stacked in this order and direction: Top- Template - drawing face up; 2nd sheet - card stock- Outside facing up; 3rd sheet- outside facing down, inside facing up. When stacked correctly, tape down all 4 sides of the template to the paper underneath by wrapping the tape.
  6. Place your template/ paper "sandwich" onto a cutting mat and put a new blade into your exacto knife. Line an "exacto knife friendly" straight edge (metal ruler, large C-thru triangle) up with the edges of the star template with your hand drawn flaps and cut. DO NOT CUT ON THE STAR EDGES - CUT AROUND THE FLAP EDGES. You may need to do each cut 2 or three times to get through all of your layers.
  7. Once the star is completely cut out, paper clip the sandwich together so that it is perfectly lined up. Then use a stylus and your straight edge to trace all the lines on the template including the original edges of the star. These are your fold lines.
  8. Most likely, the stylus will not score through all the layers so use a push pin to poke a few holes along each score line. Then flip your sandwich over and use those small holes to line up your straight edge to score on the other side.
  9. When done, fold each section forward and backward along the score lines.
  10. Remove the template and excess paper and turn your star so that they are inside to inside. Make sure each edge matches perfectly.
  11. If you decide to use a patterned paper, spray it with spray mount and attch it to the outside of each star. - Put in a fresh blade and cut around the edges to remove the excess paper. Fold each scored area so the the patterned paper creases.
  12. Coat the top of each flap on both of your stars with double sided tape or strong adhesive.
  13. Line the edges of the star up by folding the flaps in and brayer the section until the flaps attach to one another. Do this for all of the edges.
  14. Puff your star by pushing the sides.
  15. Use coordinating card stock to cut out small stars to dangle underneath. Mount photos and embellish.
  16. Use a thumb tack or hole punch to put a hole at the top and several holes at the bottom for the small stars to hang from.
  17. Poke holes at the top of each small star and string ribbon or wire through. Attach other end to a hole at the bottom of the large star. Repeat for each small star.
  18. Attach string or wire to the top of the large star and you are done. Feel free to embellish to add extra pizazz.

3 comments:

  1. Hey, sweet lady!

    Well, you are just the sweetest girl ever! Thank you so very much for the wonderful email you sent to me after reading my blog. Totally made me smile! It is such a huge compliment for you to notice the love I put into things. You don't know how much I appreciate you saying that. :) You have some absolutely gorgeous projects on here. And I'm LOVIN' the ephemera! (keep some of it and bring it to use at Inspired, lol) You can use it on my project!

    I hope you've had a wonderful holiday!
    Love,
    Jennifer

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  2. Thank you for sharing your star mobile. It's really cute! I also appreciate that you took the time to share the tutorial. I'm bookmarking this one for future use!

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