December 04, 2019
Paper Snowflake Craft - Snowman Snowflake
Winter is coming and we need to prepare for the snowstorms ahead! Prepare by gathering the art supplies you need to make a snowman snowflake! This is one of the simpler winter crafts, but the results are adorable. Some may think that you must take on a challenging project in order to make something amazing, but you don’t! Sometimes, taking just a few extra minutes on a simple craft can give you the same reactions as an advanced project. If you don’t think you have the technical skills for this craft, just flake-it-till-you-make-it! This snowman snowflake craft doesn’t take long, so if you don’t like the outcome of the first snowflake, try again and again until you have a flurry of snowmen snowflakes in your house. Soon, you’ll be saying “There’s snowplace like home!”
Want to watch the full video on this DIY? Simply scroll to the bottom of this post!
Materials
Pencil
White, Orange and Black Paper
Glue Stick
Black Pen/Marker
Let's Get Started!
1. Gather all your art materials and set them aside for easy reach while working.
2. Make your white paper into a square if it isn't already. Using the measurements on your self-healing mat, measure the width of your white piece of paper. Make note of the width and measure that out on the length of your paper. Using the guideline, place your ruler along the same guideline and draw a line, with your pencil, to form the square on your paper. We made our square for the snowflake 23cm x 23cm.
3. To make the cut, we recommend using the ruler from our Alumni kit because it comes with a finger guard. So, place the ruler with the finger guard facing your dominant hand. The flat part of the ruler should be on the side of your non-dominant hand. This will allow your dominant hand to run the blade along the side as your non-dominant hand holds the ruler steady while being protected by the finger guard. Once you’ve made the cut, set aside the scrap paper so you’re left with your perfect square.
4. Now let’s do some origami! Fold your square in half diagonally and press down on the crease.
5. Fold In half a second time and crease.
6. Fold in half a third time and crease.
7. Place your folded piece of paper on the mat so that the corner that’s made up of the center of the square is facing you and the corners of the square (the side that’s probably puffing up the most) is pointing towards the top left of your mat. Draw a curved line from the right corner to about 1/3rd of the way down the hypotenuse of your triangle (the longest side of the triangle).
8. To make it easier to draw your snowmen evenly, draw a line from your base corner to the middle of your arch.
9. Now it’s time to draw your snowmen! Remember, you’re only drawing half of each snowman. Let’s call them Leon (Left side snowman) and Rudolph (Right side snowman). We started with the Leon’s hats at the top, then draw a half of his head, then half of his body, using the line we drew down the middle to measure how far out we should go for his body. Then, draw Rudolphs’s hat at the top, half of his head, and half of his body.
10. Next, we need to draw the base of the snowmen. Draw a line straight across the snowmen’s bottoms, then make a second line about 1cm below that. Now, draw two vertical lines a little less than 1cm apart straight down from the second line and on either side of the base point. It should look like a thick capitol “T” when you’re done.
11. You can leave your snowmen like this, but we decided to give Leon arms. To add arms, draw two lines horizontally out of his body (they should be parallel to each other), then give him three thick fingers. When you’re done, it should look something like this:
12. Now it’s time to start cutting out your snowman snowflake! We’re using the K2 Medium Duty Aluminum Knife because it can cut through multiple layers of paper while also giving us the precision cuts that we need. We began by cutting the arch out because it was the longest and simplest cut.
13. Next, begin cutting out your snowman’s hat and head. We started cutting out Leon first. Make sure to use firm pressure to ensure that you get through all of the layers. You may have to go over your cuts an extra time to ensure you cut through all of the layers.
14. When cutting out the fingers, make sure to get all the way into the corners. Keep in mind that when cutting the arms you do not cut it off from the body (not a tragedy if it happens, your snowman just won’t have arms…sometimes you can’t find the right sticks for your real snowmen so your snowflake snowmen don’t have to have arms either!)
15. Move on to cutting out the snowman’s body (Leon), but when you get to the base, make sure that you leave about half a centimeter from the edge. Leave the same amount of space on the other side when cutting out the second snowman (Rudolph).
16. Move on to cutting out the second snowman (for us, it was Rudolph). We decided to give him a hollow body just for some extra creative flare. If you want to do this too, (completely optional) cut an extra half circle about 1cm in from your original line for his body. Finish cutting out your snowmen and their base, then do any extra trimmings. We found that, if you’re struggling to get through the layers, removing the top layers that you’ve already cut out will help you see what you have left to cut.
17. Carefully unfold your snowman snowflake. Don’t worry if your circles didn’t come out perfect, it adds charm. And besides, no two snowflakes are alike!
18. Using your orange paper, cut out triangles for your snowmen’s noses. We decided to only give Leon and every other alternating snowman a face. Feel free to decorate each one differently, if you would like.
19. Trace your snowmen’s hats on the black paper. Again, we’re only decorating every other snowman, so we only cut out four. Cut them out using your K2. We cut just outside of our lines to make sure the hats were bigger than the white outline. This way, no white would show when they’re glued together. (If you want to make this a Christmas snowman, you can cut out red triangles to make a Santa hat and use your scrap white paper to make the poof around the rim and the puff ball at the top)
20. Now that everything is cut out, we can start gluing! We used a regular glue stick to put everything together. Make sure that if there are any pencil marks on your snowflake, that side is facing down and if there are pencil marks on your hats, that side is the one that get’s glue.
21. Once you've glued the hats you can now glue the nose.
22. If you’re ambitious, you can cut the eyes for your snowmen out of the black paper, but we just used a black pen to make the eyes and finish out our snowman face.
POOF! You now have an adorable snowman snowflake! You can make this a snowman ornament by adding some string through one of the loops or glue it to the back of one of the snowmen. Either way, you have yourself a beautiful piece of snowman décor to make your winter frosty and bright!
We hope you enjoy another tutorial from Excel Blades. We loved this Paper Snowflake Craft project, so much so that it started snowing in New Jersey! If you decide to make this paper snowflake, make sure you tag us in your photos. As always, Happy Crafting!
