I have mentioned before  that I love Instructables.com.  I was browsing the other evening when I came across a post about cutting intricate paper snowflakes (holy moley, sorry for all the links!)  I don’t think I was ever particularly good at cutting paper snowflakes but I thought I should pass along the frustration of cutting them to my kids.  I had barely finished describing what we needed to do when Isaac declined any further involvement…so, that leaves Abigail to drive to madness!

Typically, when I cut snowflakes, I just started in on the paper in my best Edward Scissorhands imitation.  Like most things, I had no plan or desired output.  It never occurred to me to plan ahead but the instructable changed my mind.  We decided to fold the paper as usual, but then draw a pattern ahead of time.  It made me think about what I wanted the end result to be.  Cool!

Abigail didn’t really get the excitement of “the edge”.  It’s the “mother-edge” I told her, the edge from which all snowflake life flows.  “Ok Dad, can I cut now?”  Ah, sweet…she’s feeling snowflake frustration!  Anyhow, she drew a number of shapes including some trapezoids and parallelograms to see what would happen.  As she unfolded her first snowflake, she began to understand the “edge from which all blessings flow”.

We decided to hang our snowflakes on the front door, but Mohinder, our cat, didn’t like them there…blocked his view I guess.  We had to raise them up so he couldn’t reach them. 

Anyhow, we are pretty proud of our work.  I expect that we’ll make one each night for awhile.  She loves to do arts and crafts projects and this is right up her alley!  I expect that it won’t be long until we learn to make paper-mache or 3-d origami-like ornaments or tissue paper ornaments, etc.

Abigail is also pretty generous and wants to make enough so that we can give them to people for Christmas…I like the way she thinks!