Seeing stars
Whilst drinking my tea this morning I amused myself by reading my blog from this time last year, when we had the last minute chance to zip off on a short cruise, came home and spent the weekend with our friends in Lancashire and then buzzed off to Berlin. Good grief! Those were a crazy couple of weeks.
This year, we’ve been at home since my birthday, enjoying a break from travelling by catching up with one or two more mundane things. Our washing machine developed a fault which Miele decided was “beyond economic repair” so we’ve had a new machine to work our way around, which turned out to be more tricky than we anticipated.
When the light begins to fade in the late afternoon, I’ve been enjoying my Readly subscription, which gives me access to all the German magazines I enjoy, especially at this time of the year. One thing has been immediately apparent this year: the German trend for dark colours for Christmas 2022. Time and again I grabbed a screenshot and took note of all the navy blues, the bottle greens and pewter greys. I’m not sure if I see it as a more classy alternative to the red and green or if it just looks dreary!
Most of all, I like to see what crafty ideas are about, for the German audience is more receptive to hand made touches, especially in the run up to Christmas.
The single item running through every image this year it seemed, is a folded paper star.
Bearing in mind that a couple of years ago, we were making stars from paper bags (I just checked, it was 2017!) the idea of folding these stars isn’t new. However, my eye was caught by something a litle more elaborate.
Based on a broadly similar principle to the paper bag stars, the stars I had seen were cut using a die cutting machine. I placed an order for a couple of these metal dies and eagerly awaited delivery.
Who’d have thought that such intricate shapes could be made using those simple shapes? Cutting them using my die cutter meant they were precise and the score lines make for accurate folds too.
I was really pleased with the results, especially when folded from coloured parchment paper which has been sitting in my stash since I bought a couple of packs in a French supermarket some years ago. I cut and made several of these stars before becoming frustrated by the one drawback of a die cutter: the size is fixed. Every one is identical and there’s no means of variation.
So my Hero did what he does best and spent a few hours drafting the patterns into vector files so that I could cut them on my Silhouette machine and here we are with a collection of stars big and small.
Thinking that instead of cutting more “test samples” I ought to decide what colours and make some decent ones to hang here at home next month, I settled down with a cut of tea and opened the UK edition of House Beautiful in Readly.
Right on trend then!
