Paper Triangle Spiral Ornament


This craft project was inspired by a recent trip to Tuesday Morning where I snatched up this Martha Stewart Craft Kit that includes a template for making spirals and stars out of paper for just $3.99.


The kit includes this plastic triangle template, a craft blade (that supposedly uses standard utility knife blades) with a retracting plastic guard, and a small instruction pamphlet. The kit is designed for 12 inch square sheets of paper--the standard in scrapbook paper sizes.


I was excited to try it out so I searched my stash for a 12 inch piece of scrapbook paper that had patterns on both sides. I learned that most of my scrapbook paper stash is single sided, but I did manage to find a nice high contrast piece of paper. 2-sided paper is now on my list for the next trip to the craft store.


I folded the paper into a triangle and opened the plastic template. The paper fits neatly inside.


Then I used the included knife to slice along the grooves in the template. It took about 30 seconds to cut the paper. It was really easy and fast.


When I was done, I was left with this nicely sliced piece of paper. I looked to the instructions for the next step and was left scratching my head.


The instructions are incredibly vague: "Staple, tape, or glue the opposite corner tips of the outermost band together." Huh? What band? Which direction? So off to youtube to see if I could find some better instructions. Then the problem was not knowing what to call these things, but after some searching I found some instructions that helped. All the videos I watched started at the center taping or gluing the first square together one direction, then flipping the piece over and doing the next band or square the other direction.  The first two squares had to be taped (or glued) as my stapler wouldn't fit underneath.


After the first two, I continued folding the bands toward each other, but this time I stapled the points. I kept reversing the direction with each band/square. to finish out the spiral.


If you're still having a hard time picturing the process, check out this video: https://youtu.be/X1eWpN-OClE

The first couple minutes of the video shows how to cut the paper yourself if you don't have a template, and around the 1:55 mark, it shows the process of creating the spiral.


When you're all done you have this cool spiral decoration that can be hung up with a piece of fishing line or by stapling a ribbon to the top. You can continue to make 5 more of them and staple them together to make a star/snowflake. A star using 12 inch paper would be quite large though, so I tried out some smaller pieces of paper with this template to see how they worked. 

The 8.5 inch square (I just folded the triangle and cut off the excess from an 8.5 X 11 inch piece of cardstock) turned out pretty well. I just placed it in the middle of the template and cut the grooves that lined up with the paper. I also tried a 6 inch piece of paper, but felt the strips were a bit too wide to be truly successful. In my searching for instructions, I found out that Martha Stewart also sells a smaller template that's designed for 6 inch paper squares.
  

This was a super easy and quick project, once I figured out how to fold the paper. The instructions leave something to be desired, but the template works really slick.  If you want to check to see if your local Tuesday Morning has one of these kits available for purchase, you can try their product locator hotline: 1-800-901-0881 with the SKU: 1529920 and your local store's zip code.

Neither Tuesday Morning nor Martha Stewart Crafts compensated me for this post (but I wouldn't mind if they did, I like them both a whole lot).

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