How to make a Star Card

Today I am going to look at how to make a Star Card. As with a lot of things I make, it isn't tricky, it is just fiddly and time consuming.

To make a Star Card you will need:

Four different colours of card stock - approximately an A4 piece of each
Double sided tape adhesive
Ribbon
Stampin' Trimmer

I normally say use what adhesive you like, you don't want to use liquid glue for this project. It will just take too long for the glue to dry before you can move on to the next one. I also find that most snail adhesives are not strong enough for this project, you definitely want double sided tape.

First Step - Cut and Score

First you will need to cut and score your card stock. You definitely need a trimmer and scorer for this project, which is why I recommend the Stampin' Trimmer.

You need seven each of the following sizes:

5 cm x 15 cm
5 cm x 13 cm
5 cm x 11 cm
5 cm x 10 cm

Once you have cut this card stock you will need to score it at the half way mark. I cut all of mine and then scored all of mine, scoring seven of the same sized pieces in one hit to make it harder to forget where to score. For ease of reference, you score as follows:

15 cm piece at 7.5 cm
13 cm piece at 6.5 cm
11 cm piece at 5.5 cm
10 cm piece at 5 cm

Second Step - adhere seven pieces

You will start by adhering each of the seven pieces together.

Start with the longest piece, which would be the other piece, and stick the next longest piece just to the end, like this.

You don't need a lot of double sided Stampin' Up tape, it is strong stuff. It won't help your project to have more, but unlike with liquid glue too much won't hurt it either.

Now fold down the inside piece, in the pictures that is the orange piece, and put a small piece of tape on the outside. Take off the plastic so the adhesive is exposed, then fold the next biggest piece, in this case the blue piece, on top of it. This is to make sure that the pieces all line up when they are folded, in case your cutting or scoring wasn't 100% accurate. Then put a piece of tape on the blue piece, remove the plastic, fold the pink piece on top.

Do this to all seven stacks so that you end up with seven little star parts.

Third step - stick the seven pieces together

Now you will stick the seven pieces together, remember if you want this to be a card (and not a permanent decoration) then you need to leave two outside pieces not stuck together, as shown in the photo. Again, you don't need a lot of tape, it is strong stuff.

Fourth step - stick on the ribbon

Now you are going to use your tape to stick on your ribbon. Remember to stick the ribbon on when the card is closed, because the edge or binder will be much bigger than when the card is open.

If you want the card to be open all the time just stick all the pieces together, but put a piece of ribbon in to hang it with.

Fifth step - anchor the ribbon

Now you need to stick a piece of card stock over the top of the ribbon to anchor it, and this time I am going to tell you do put double sided tape all the way along the two short edges to anchor the ribbon so it can cope with repeated opening and closing. This piece of orange card I cut from the left over card stock (see below) and it is 4 cm by 6 cm. Obviously it has a wide border, you could make it 4.5 cm by 7 cm instead, like the example below with the happy birthday greeting on it.

Now you have finished your star card, you can put decorations inside the card if you like or you can leave it as is and just put a greeting on the outside anchor pieces. If the person is likely to actually use it as a decoration, I think it probably looks better just as a star without the bits in between, but everyone likes their own thing.

NOTE:

If you are trying to figure out how much card stock you need, I managed to make all of the longest pieces (5 cm x 15 cm) from a piece of A4 whisper white card stock by cutting them in accordance with the photos below. I have also included a photo of the smallest pieces cut out, which if you do it this way results in a 10cm strip that you can use later for a 10 x 10.5 cm card.