You made it! If christmas is hard for you, if you're reading this, you made it. It's over for another year. If your nights have been getting ever longer, if you're reading this, you made it. The nights start getting shorter from here on out.⁠ If this year has been a kick in the teeth, if you're reading this, you've almost made it. Just a couple more days to go until you can officially say you survived and tell 2022 to suck it. You can do it, I have faith in you.⁠ I continue to be but a figment of [...]

We made it to the solstice! The days start getting longer from here on out*. I'll be making a few little pretties to celebrate. And you know how I was saying the other day that I was bummed that the fancy paper for these only came in a really limited range of colors? Yeeeeeeeah...I found some other paper. Paper in more colors. Paper in better colors. Paper in freaking gradients that fill my soul with joy and stave off despair for long enough to make it through one more day. I do not, alas, have a good generally available source [...]

One more (you know, for now, I make no promises about not succumbing to temptation and doing more a bit later, there's a lot of winter left). This is star D from the book with a slight nudge to where you fold up the bottom, the pieces flipped around (so the point that's normally toward the inside of the star is instead towards the outside of the star), and following the widest lines on the assembly guide. All of which sounds confusing as hell if you don't actually have the pieces of paper in front of you, sort of like [...]

Here's another round of variations, this time a little less dramatic, because ok fine, maybe not everyone shares my deep and abiding need to change every aspect of every set of directions at every possible opportunity (though really, that's how I ended up with this job, so I can't complain too much about my contumacious nature). This is star A (which is the simplest one to start with if you're feeling nervous). Once again, the white one is in the book, and the blue one is the same set of folding instructions, just with a very slight nudge to where [...]

Ok so check this out, these are the same star. No really, I followed the same folding instructions to make both of them, just with a few tweaks on the blue one! This is seriously one of my favorite things about the stars, teeny tiny little changes sort of propagate out to give you totally different looks. I talk a bit about some things you can experiment with in the book but I wanted to show you some examples too, mostly just because they're pretty and I kind of want to show them off. So the white one is star [...]