It wouldn’t be the holiday season if I didn’t make something.  This year I decided to make something new.

I call them Christmas Stars, but really the one star is two stars combined. In this post I will tell you how to make these stars in three easy steps.

Step 1

First I made the smaller stars which are called Finnish Stars. I made these with some vintage sheet music so that there were patterns on both sides.  Really, any paper would work so long as it is a medium weight.  Good quality wrapping paper, scrap book paper, old book pages etc – all could work.

Here are instructions on how to make the smaller stars. For the smaller center stars I used a 7 inch square piece of sheet music.  Then I divided it by 12 and cut twelve equal strips of paper.  I made several of these stars.  The completed smaller star is shown below.

Give yourself grace.  The first couple of stars I made – didn’t turn out well.  The third star was great, and the subsequent stars were pretty darn easy.

Just an FYI, I found that using a small hot glue gun was the easiest way to secure the stars.   You can use Elmers glue or any other household glue too.  It just takes a bit longer to dry.  You will need two of the configurations shown below to make one star.  I secured the strips in the middle using hot glue.  When the stars were assembled, the glued centers prevented the pieces of paper from shifting or sliding. The photo below is courtesy of the link I provided above from the Instructables website.

 

 

 

Once you get the paper crosses made and secured in the middle, the rest of the steps described on the website are pretty straight forward. Below is a photo of one of my completed stars.

 

 

Step 2 

Step two involves making the several large stars.  These larger stars are SUPER SIMPLE to make. Here are the instructions for the larger stars.  In a nutshell, you take 10-12 paper lunch bags and glue them together.  (Hello my friend little hot glue gun!). Do you remember making snowflakes out of paper?  It is the same concept.  Glue all your paper bags together in the same direction and then cut out your design.

Once again, you can use any type of household glue.  The tutorial uses a glue stick.  I’m sure Elmers or any other glue would work too.  I am impatient.  Who has 24 hours to wait for glue to dry?  Not I.  So, I love a glue gun.

Here is my tip for this process.  When cutting out your design in the paper lunch bags – don’t use scissors.  I found that the paper is too thick for the scissors to cut through.  I used an Exacto blade and just made several passes to cut through all the layers of paper and glue.  A box cutter would also work well.

Here is an image from the link above, courtesy of Babble Dabble Do, which is the link I shared above.  As noted, the only difference is that I used hot glue to secure my bags together and I did not use scissors to cut out my designs.

 

 

 

After making my lunch bag stars, I took them outside and spray painted them with gold paint.  Of course, you can use white lunch bags too! I had brown lunch bags in the house and prefer to use whatever I have readily available.

Here is a photo of a star before I spray painted it.

 

 

 

If you made 3 small Finnish Stars – then you will need 3 lunch bag stars.  If you made 5 Finnish Stars – then you will need 5 lunch bag stars.  You get the idea…

Step 3

Step 3 is super simple and very uncomplicated.  Use your friendly small hot glue gun to attach the small Finnish star onto the larger lunch bag star.  Also, I used a hand held hole puncher to make a small hole in the larger stars so that I could hang them up.

That’s it! You are done.  You now are the proud creator of Christmas Stars!!

Here are some more photos for you. I intentionally left the Finnish star off one of the larger lunch bag stars so you could see the difference.