I've been wanting to try making a light up star for a good long time now, and I guess this month's challenge was the kick in the butt I needed!

It turns out that photographing a lit lamp is not as easy as I'd hoped, so please forgive the quality of the pix.

The star is about 7 inches. It's a "small stellated dodecahedron". It's made from this shimmery white cardstock that doesn't show up well in these pictures, but it really does shimmer. The bird is backed in blue foil. The leaves are backed in a couple layers of tracing paper. Inside the star is a balled up string of battery powered LED Christmas lights.

           

Thanks Craftster for inspiring me to finally do this!

Hi, this is my first post, yay
So I make these paper stars a lot, and its been eating up my life for a while now. Like these:

http://www.waxor.com/~child/starpage/bandwidthfriendly/yayprettyclosesmall.jpg

There are a bunch more here: http://www.waxor.com/~child/starpage/

It started with pdfs of blank star shapes from here: http://www.korthalsaltes.com/index.html
that site seems to be down lately; the ones I've saved are reposted here: http://www.waxor.com/~child/pdfs
then I started adding on extra points and drawing on the patterns and coloring with pencils and hanging beads and now, to quote KMFDM, "i'm out of control - and i love it!"
This shit is so fun and so cheap. Printer paper, the regular kind. Elmers glue. colored pencils. fucking toothpicks. Used to draw a few cells in and kinda makeshift light-table it onto the rest, now my dad has a fancy printer with a scanner so I go there and photoshop to rotate them into positions. Superexcited for my works in progress, which include an all-photoshop star (my first!) and another excessively embellished with the 1 pixel pencil tool. Many stars didn't get a clear enough picture the first time I borrowed the camera, and more designs have been completed since I took these, so I'll hopefully post another batch soon whether y'all reply or not   Then the patterns are scored for the easy folding, cut, folded, glued, and hung from the pipes on the ceiling. When we ran out of room on those we started stringing a net across the room. So far my buddy counted like 80 or 90 I think, but I want to completely fill my apartment with them. One website on the topic likened paper polyhedra models to tribbles, and I've come to see the wisdom in that.

But I'm thinking, EVERYONE SHOULD MAKE STARS!!! They are fun to make. They are stupidly easy to make, but the more you're into it, the cooler shit you'll think up to do. So it like stretches, its not any little bit hard to start and there doesnt seem to be a limit to how far you can take them. And its super cheap. and its fun. My motives for trying to spread this infection: it took me way too long from when I started just spray painting them till I started making my own patterns, and there've been a few helpful epiphanies spread out over the whole timeline. But, if other people start, and have their own different epiphanies, and then we can all "steal" each others' cool ideas, which could speed up our own new ideas, which can then be shared to speed up other new ideas, etc.. and soon the stars will be AWESOME. For example, I've been mulling over ideas about how to safely light them up as lamps. So far, nothing for sure. Maybe someone knowing more about lightbulbs would solve this problem. Thinking about non-paper materials too, but there's a problem with setting the angles just right - the nice thing about the paper is that when its all finally put together, the angles sort themselves out on their own. But the point is, everyone should be making stars. The meme needs to spread.

And for my first post here, this is getting awfully long, so I go now. Thanks for looking!