Pensive Frog

If your elementary school years were anything like mine, you’ll remember the never-ending cycle of fads. Every few months, a new “thing” would sweep the schoolyard, monopolizing recess time and dictating after-school plans. In 6th grade, my class became enamored with collecting pencil shavings. Seriously. There was a certain brand of pencil that, when sharpened carefully with a hand-held sharpener, would generate tight, smooth cones of pencil shavings. Kids would compete to produce the biggest shaving cones, and we’d save the best specimens in our desks. I remember our teacher was perplexed, but she also said it was an improvement over her previous year’s class, which had been obsessed with collecting eraser dust. How lame is that?
Anyway, sixth grade finally progressed to the double dutch jump rope phase, which lasted months and even sucked in the boys. Fourth grade had been the Chinese jump rope era, followed by the reign of Chinese jacks. Fifth grade was marred by collecting Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, and second grade was all about macrame. Seventh and eighth grades were the years of friendship bracelets, painstakingly knotted from embroidery thread. This was also the age of friendship pins, where beads strung on safety pins advertised the wearer’s coolness level.
I can’t remember when I first tried origami, I think it had several comebacks over the years. But now that the holidays are almost here, I’m suddenly excited about the idea of making paper ornaments, especially fancy stars.
Here’s some instructions for making Polish Stars.
And some miniature Origami Stars.
And when your young cousins get out of hand at the dinner table, how about a Ninja Throwing Star?
Another pretty Origami Star.
For the adventurous.
For the insane.
And I even found instructions for the polyhedron I made in geometry class. w00t!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under Crafts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.