2: Paper stars.

I've enjoyed origami since I was young. Folding paper and making neat little figures always amused me.

When I was 12, a classmate introduced me to origami "lucky stars". You take a strip of paper, fold it into a pentagon and puff it up, like so:

(Lucky star instructions by carriephlyons.deviantart.com)

I thought these were the coolest origami I'd ever seen. Most of the origami I'd done was two-dimensional, flat, and, well... kind of boring. These were not only 3D, they were cute! I had my mom take me to the import store so I could buy a canister of strips to fold them out of.

I have no idea what happened to all those stars I folded when I was 12. There were probably about 100. I don't really know how many strips were in that can. But after that little fit of folding fun, I dropped the whole idea and forgot about it.

Until two years ago.

I started papercrafting (yet another post will be made for that) and I found that at times I wanted to make things out of paper but I wasn't in the mood for glue or cutting out complicated pieces. I just wanted something simple that didn't take a lot of thinking.

I remembered those origami stars.

I, once again, bought strips for making them. I folded every single one. I got better and better at it as time went on. Unfortunately, there wasn't much time for that; I went through all the strips very quickly.

Then I found out you could print lucky star strips. Print them?! What nonsense, I thought!

How wrong was I?

I bought scrapbook paper and cut it down so I could run it through the printer and get the template on the paper. Then I cut that down so that I had lots of strips made out of scrapbook paper in various patterns. I spent a lot of time in December 2007 folding stars. I bought a large plastic lidded container at the Dollar Tree specifically for storing the stars.

While at my grandma's house, I hit 1,000 stars.

(That's actually a picture of some of my stars, in case you were wondering.)

Even though I'd hit 1,000, I still kept going. Everyone asked me the same thing: what are you going to do with those stars? I really didn't know. I thought maybe I'd give them to friends, maybe I'd leave them in random places for people to find. I did a little bit of both for a while. My friend Ashley suggested I hang them from my ceiling, and I ended up with about 100 up there. But they still weren't really going anywhere... until recently.

Another hobby (and another entry) that I have is making jewelry out of polymer clay. I've had the fortunate opportunity a few times to sell it online. Each time I sell jewelry, I package it with some stars, like so:

I think this is going to be the final resting place for a lot of my stars. It's a good compromise; they're not getting thrown in the trash, they're being given to friends and valued customers as an extra little surprise. They don't feel like such a waste of time anymore.

Except for this beauty, which I made last week:

Yeah, do you see my hand there? This thing is over a foot wide. It's hanging from my ceiling, right in front of my window. I made it by taping together a lot of pieces of printer paper, end to end. I think I used 16, but if I did it again, I'd probably use 18 to make sure it was strong enough to actually puff it up more properly. I had to use tape in several places to hold it together. But I think it was worth it. Every time I look at it, it makes me smile. It feels like the culmination of my star-making habit.

That doesn't mean, however, that I'm going to stop; I'll probably be making paper stars for a long time.