Artist~Teacher... tishalou

I got the idea for this from one of the middle school teachers in our county – she was nice enough to offer her materials, ideas, samples to the newbies before she retired. I saw this little gem and I snatched it up – she even gave me the stack of astro brite paper to go with it. I have only taught it once – as a little extra at the end of the year to one 3rd grade class... See what you can do with it.

1.Fold the inside pages - 5 pages works best to form the star. This is made with regular copy paper – I used the astro brite neons. Your inside papers should be twice as large as your finished book. I made a large one for this sample. The finished book is 4” so the inside pages are 8”.

 2.Fold each page in half twice so your paper has a + on it with 4 equal squares. Then fold once diagonally. Push in the diagonal folds so they meet in the middle of the unfolded square.

4. Glue all the inside pages together. It is important that you have all the closed corners matched up and all the open “mouths” lined up – then you glue the outside of one page to the outside of the next page.
7. Now glue the top page to the cover and the bottom page to the back cover. The ribbon should wrap around the corner like this:
8.Tie your ribbon – flip the book around to open it into a star! I made this one with only 4 inside pages since I had alternating colors.

I made another one the size of the original one I had and added, yes some zentangles to it!! The inside pages are 3” - final book 1.5” It's so cute!

I did my drawings before I assembled the book – but you could work with it after assembly as well by folding it back and forth to get a flat surface to draw on.
Play around with some fun papers and see what you can come up with.. These would make great little ornaments – put a spin on the giving tree for the holidays!