Origami top star - or at least I tried!

Yesterdays several attempts to make a sort of oversize octahedron star to put in the top of our small and over prized Christmas tree, resulted in one star that was too soft and fragile, one that didn't stay in shape because the paper was too plastic coated, and one that was almost impossible to make, because the paper was too thick. But still, they were kind of pretty, I suppose.

The small one is the one from the other day, made in 15 x 15 centimetres paper. The white one with gold leaf paint, was the one that was veeeery hard to fold, because the paper was so heavy - it's made in 30 x 30 centimetres scrapbooking paper from the hobbyshop, because I didn't have any A3.

But the gold paint looks rather nice. If you want to decorate the tips on this kind of star, you should do it when you have done all the horizontal and diagonal folds, but before you do the last folds - like this:

This size of paper makes a star about 11 centimetres in diameter. I found it a bit too small for the tree, and started digging in my wrapping paper supplies, and found some paper from IKEA and some from the Tiger Stores, that looked festive. I made 45 x 45 centimetres squares for the large ones, and the finished star is about 17 centimetres in diameter.

These had a nice size, but upscaling origami is always hard. It is as if the larger surfaces become too heavy and pull the paper in all the wrong directions. But I managed two large stars that didn't fall totally apart:

And finally, after much wiggling and twisting - and taping a pencil to the top of the tree - I managed to top our odd looking little tree (it has clusters of crooked branches with too much air in between and was insanely expensive) with this one! 

So a merry merry 'Lillejuleaften' (= Little Christmas Eve) as we say in Denmark, to all of you out there.