Yep, you read it right, I altered the star lantern from Jennifer Maker. My youngest has his own little tree in his room with his favorite ornaments and last year refused any attempt at a tree skirt or topper. This year I offered to make him a Mickey topper or a star. He asked for a star and as soon as I saw Jennifer's, I knew with a little tweak, it would be perfect. Her team was wonderful about answering my question about how big the finished star was so I had an idea of how much I needed to downsize.
The original star lands around 14 inches and each arm is around 7 inches, way too big for a little 4 foot tree. My wonderful engineer hubby said that a six inch star would keep the proportion just fine, so I needed each arm to be around 3 inches once folded. Now, when you are adjusting the size, it's hard to tell on screen, but I cheated by using the score line image and stretched it over the point to the inside. That gave me a realistic idea of the actual size, then I deleted the score line. I also deleted the piece with the notch for the pendant light and duplicated an extra of the regular points. I cut the image on glitter cardstock. Be ready for a long wait as it took nearly 45 minutes to cut. The glitter paper setting on the Cricut will cut it twice. I found it did not need the second pass as it only made more of a mess so I stopped it half way through the second cut.Be sure to follow Jennifer's suggestion to only assemble 4 of the points before gluing them together. The last point is much easier to add when you can glue one tab at a time and save the long point for last.
How did I attach it to the tree? I used scissors and cut a small notch in the base of the star and slid a chopstick with hot glue in it up to the top. The stick hides well in his tree so I did not feel like I needed to paint. I do recommend a twist tie to keep it in place. Thanks for looking! April
