Christmas is only two days away, so most of you have probably already finished your holiday decorating. I designed this project with New Year’s Eve in mind, but kept it quick, simple, and easily adaptable for Christmas in case you’re a procrastinator like I am! (And really I could see this hanging on a teenager’s wall any time of year…)
There are quite a few 3D star designs to choose from in the online store, but this project was actually inspired by a new series of intricately patterned one-dimensional stars designed by Elizabeth Mayne like this one. I knew I could easily turn these designs into 3d lighted stars that are super quick to assemble with the help of Silhouette adhesive cardstock. I started by opening my shape in Silhouette Studio and then making two copies.
To be able to adhere two stars back to back, I needed to widen the sticky border around the shape. I simply used the Offset Tool with a distance of 0.2 inches to form my new border and then deleted the original outline from the shape. This left me with the design shown in black above, and I would need to cut two of these shapes from adhesive cardstock for every lighted star on my garland. To make the vellum liners for each star, I just selected my second copy and clicked “Release Compound Path”. After deleting everything except for the outline, I could then cut two of these shapes from vellum for each lighted star.
Once all of my shapes were cut, the assembly was super easy. I just pressed my vellum liners onto each intricate self-adhesive star, being careful not to touch the edges so that they remained sticky enough for my final assembly. If I had used regular cardstock, I would have spent all night gluing these and probably gooped it all over the outside of that pretty design! To give the flat stars a little dimension, I scored each one along its five axes (from the point to the opposite side), then folded the points outward and inner angles inward.
I used a battery-operated LED clear light strand for my garland because the wire is very thin and the bulbs do not get hot. (But please never leave light strands unattended!) After placing two LED bulbs inside the star and coiling the extra wire in the center, I adhered the second star on top by simply pressing the sticky edges together. (If you’ve handled your stars too much and the edges are no longer sticky, a few well-placed glue dots should help.)
The finished garland will look like this. I chose black and white cardstock to give it a New Year’s Eve feel, but you can just as easily make it in blue and light grey or red and green for Christmas too. It can be hung just about anywhere because it’s so lightweight…and even works on your Christmas tree too.
On a side note – this really is the nicest adhesive cardstock I’ve tried to date. It’s thicker than most so you can use it for all kinds of projects other than just cards and scrapbook pages, cuts really cleanly even with the most intricate of designs, and it’s pretty sticky so you don’t have to worry about anything falling apart. They’ve also got some beautiful colors and I’m hoping they come out with even more soon.
What are you hoping to see from Silhouette this year?
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This is beautiful! I created banners for gifts this year, but they sure didn’t look as sparkly and decorative as yours! I must try that paper you mentioned!