Paper handicrafts for Christmas, and more Sleepers Awake

Last week Professor Carol wrote about Moravian Stars and included a link to a site that gives instructions in making something similar by folding and weaving long strips of paper.

Here are a few we made today:

I used legal-sized (8 1/2" x 14") copier paper for all the stars.  The size of the stars is determined by the width of the strips, and the strips must be at least 24 times as long as they are wide.  For the small ones, I used 1/2" x 14" strips.  For the medium one I used 3/4" by 28" strips (that's two 14" long strips taped end-to-end) and for the large one I used 1" x 28".  The larger ones were a lot easier to work with.

One of the ladies at the Ambleside Online Forum shared a link showing how to make a Moravian Star tree topper.  You start with a polygon for a base and then add cones to each face of it to make the star.  I've done the base so far, but this is a lot harder than the woven stars.

Base and template for points

That base is an icosahedron, which means that it has twenty sides.  Each face has three edges, so the points will be made of three-sided cones.

This thing sounds suspiciously like a geometry lesson, and in fact, the stars were orgininally created by a geometry teacher.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Here's a lovely rendition of Sleepers Awake played on the guitar.  Enjoy!