Design your own - How I do this

In this tutorial I'm explaining how I make all the printable sheets that I post on here, so you can do it too. I don't know how many easy steps it's going to be, but it's going to be easy.

What you need:

STEP 1: After you've gathered your supplies, fold the sheet of paper in half lengthwise. Imagine it to be a supersized folding strip, and get an idea of where you want your designs to go. Then you're ready to start doodling with your pencil. As you can see this is sketch is of one of the christmas designs from my previous post.

STEP 2: Doodle and sketch until you are happy with the design. When you are, trace the final lines with you marker/pen. Make sure it's as smooth as possible.

STEP 3: Erase the sketch. You won't need the pencil lines anymore, so erase them. Your design will now look all cleaned up.

STEP 4: Make it digital. The following is not so easy to show in images, so follow these steps very carefully.

- Scan and save your design.
- Open the image in Paint.
- Click File -> Save As, and select 'Monochrome Bitmap' as the format. Click Save. Click OK if it tells you that doing this will screw up the colors, screwing up the colors is exactly what we want.
- Select all (Ctrl+A).
- Copy (Ctrl+C).
- Open a new blank paint file.
- Paste (Ctrl+V). You need to do all this copying and pasting because the monochrome file will no longer accept color, and we do want to put color back into the design later.
- Save. This is the new file that we'll be working from.

Now it's time to clean up the image. Select the pencil and zoom in. Remove any stray pixels and smooth out the lines a little. Pay special attention to whether the bits of your design that you are going to color in are properly closed off. You wouldn't want to flood fill the entire image.

STEP 5: DONE. Or at least, if you wanted a black and white only design, your image is now finished and you can skip to step 7. If you want color, keep reading.

Note: you may want to do some cropping or rearranging of the design so that it will look nice one under the other. You'll understand when you look at step 7.

STEP 6: Color! You can now use Paint or other software to give the image all the color you want. Here I used paint to flood fill the items, and later I used Gimp (photoshop for cheapskates) to add a shaded background

STEP 7: Now we're going to get all of this onto a printable sheet. I usually do this in Word but I bet there are other programs that do this. Make a table of 20 columns and 1 row. Make sure they cover most of the page and use the right-click option that distributes the columns evenly to get them all the same size. You can leave them like this or make the lines grey and dotted so that they will not show up on the stars as much.
Paste the finished image into the first column. Right-click it and change its width to around 1 cm. To be accurate about this, check out the column width in the table settings, and use this measurement for the width of the image. Copy the shrunken image, hit Enter, and paste it. Fill up about half of the column with your image. Then copy the 'stack' of design, and paste it into the other columns.

STEP 8: Print! Your sheet is now ready to print. Well done :).

Optional: At this point I use CutePDF Writer to convert the whole thing into a .pdf file and upload it for your enjoyment.

If any of this is not working out for you, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message and I'll see if I can be of any help.
Good luck! :)

Request: Christmas

For everyone who is still busy doing Christmas decorations: Why not string some origami stars together and hang them in your tree?

You can download the christmas themed sheet of folding strips by clicking here.

EDIT: Now also available without the background color. Click me.

Request: Girly

I'd nearly forgotten about my very own blog :O

I just noticed some requests were posted, so here is a sheet of girly flowers and hearts in black and white for you :)

I'll get to work on the christmas-themed designs, so stay tuned.

Autumn

The leaves are falling, and they have really nice colours. I was inspired to make this printable pattern to fold origami stars with :).

Click here to download, and leave a message if you want to see this in black and white.

I'm back...and so is this.

Retro origami stars, complete with clashing colors and pointless dots. Two combinations on one sheet, that you can download here.

The Ace of Spades

...and other cards.

Now you can print and fold origami stars with card suits on them :). Click here to download.

Creative Project Episode 3 - Stop Printing.

Of course pre-made printable origami star designs are awesome (I wouldn't be making them if they weren't) but sometimes you want to give the printer a break, make something entirely new, or you just don't have one around for a while, like on the bus or at school. This post is about alternatives to printable star-folding-strips.

Design your own


The templates with just empty lines that I have on here aren't just for cutting lines on the back of continuous patterns. You can also use them to design your own strips. Just print a sheet of blank strips and get going with the crayons, paint, pens, glitter and everything else you ever wanted on an origami star.

I did this when I started out cutting my own strips, and it looked like this (the stars you see on the right) and this.

It was great fun to do, and you could end up with some interesting looking personalized origami stars.



Recycle


I occasionally use old magazines and catalogs to fold stars from. They usually have lots of colors, and best of all, they are entirely free. Some flyers and magazines use really thin glossy paper that isn't too suitable to fold sturdy stars from, but after some experimenting you should have a feel for the kind of paper you can use. Just cut the page into strips, and there you are.

Polkadots

Today's sheet is an assortment of different colorful polka dot patterns. They can be downloaded for printing here.

Please leave a comment if you'd want a sheet of just one of the designs, or different colors or anything else to do with dots.

The Oval Portrait

I made you a poetry-inspired sheet today, with portraits of E.A. Poe and his raven (or maybe not HIS, but still a raven ;))

Quoth the Raven, 'Download here.'

BEEES!

Another one fresh from the MS Paint press:

Bees! Not sure if they'll make you any honey, but at least they won't sting either.

Click here for a printable sheet.

Note: Link was broken, works now.

Fancy Lace

Fold classy lace origami stars with this template.

This looks really good on colored paper.

YARRRRR

Aye, t'is a pirate sheet!

Piratey stars in white/red and black/red can be folded from the strips in this file.

UPDATE (29/5): now also in black and white (for white or colored paper) with stripes and without.

Like Colored Clockwork

I've made some colored versions of the gears I posted earlier.

You can find the old-fashioned looking brown/grey ones here.

You can find the rainbow colored ones here.

Requests: Bugs & Ballet

Oh wow, I'm doing my first real round of requests!

Akasha's request:

Black & White ladybugs, I've got 'em for you here.

Abay's request:

I fixed you up a sheet of pointe shoes. Hope you like them :). Click here.

Candy :)

Took a while, but here's a sheet of candy strips for you to print and fold :)

Checkmate

Here's a chess-inspired template.

Cutting lines are here if you want 'em. Print them on the back of the sheet so you know where to cut.

Get Your Geek On

Now for your enjoyment: binary sheets. They are without lines, so cut to your own preferred size or print these (vertical) or these (horizontal) lines on the back of the sheet.

Plain black and white - horizontal or vertical

'the matrix' color scheme - horizontal or vertical

Rainbow - vertical or horizontal


Fun fact: this is the binary code for "let's generate some random binary" over and over

Yet More Spring Time!

Time to put our favourite little insects on some origami stars.

Colored only, here ( b/w on request, leave a comment)

Spring is here!

Spring has arrived, and it's time for flowers.

Black/white strips here.

To boldly go...

...where no man has gone before!

Origami paper stars with space stuff on it!

Color (as seen over there --->)

Black/white (it would be awesome to color it in yourself)

Like Clockwork

For the more technically minded among you, who don't care much for candy hearts and butterflies, here's a sheet of strips with a gear design.

This one is only in black and white for now, but if you want one with a colored background / colored gears, leave a comment.

Heart Candy!

Love is in the air, or maybe not.

Either way, I just made a star-folding sheet with a heart candy theme.

Black/white(/grey)

Color

Enjoy!

Butterflies

I hope you enjoy this sheet of butterfly strips.

There's one in color, and one in black and white.

Coloured squiggles

Pink, blue and purple must be my favourite colour combination.

Download some colorful squiggles here.

Creative Project Episode 2 - Earrings

I finally located some proper tweezers to do this project with, so here goes.

How to make earrings with origami lucky stars:

1. You need:
- 2 paper stars
- 2 earring hooks, 2 earring pins (these come in the little baggies you see)
- tweezers/tongs with a narrow tip
- long, kind of thick needle
- beads (optional)


2. Use the needle to poke a hole in the stars. Wiggle it around a bit to make the hole large enough for the pins.


3. Open up the ends of the pins a little so you can slip the hooks onto them. Then close them back up.

4. Put your stars onto the pins, maybe with some beads as well. Leave about 3mm at the end.

5. Bend the ends into a small loop. Admire your new earrings!

Creepy Crawlies

It's not exactly halloween yet, but I made some spider + web stars anyway.

Spiders + webs here.

Spiders only here.

Squiggles!

And welcome back for another installment of Stuff to Print on Colored Paper.

Here are some squiggly star folding strips.

I will be making coloured versions of these some time soon :).

Creative Project Episode 1 - Bracelet

Now I've folded a whole bunch of origami stars, and they look all pretty in a jar on my desk. But I think it's nice to do some crafty stuff with them, so today I made a bracelet.


How to make a bracelet out of paper stars:


1. You need: folded paper stars, thin elastic, a needle, and some varnish (optional).





2. Thread the needle with the elastic and start poking it through the stars. The easiest way is to first push through one of the 'dents' on the side and have the needle find its way to the point on the other side.






3. Once there are enough stars on your elastic, take the needle off, cut the other end off the spool, pull tight, and tie.






4. If you want to, you can make the stars a little more resistant to being on your skin all the time by spraying some varnish on them.




5. Admire your new origami lucky bracelet!