More Origami Christmas Decorations: Outer Space

Last year my sixth form origami club had great fun decorating the sixth form Christmas tree with a colourful rainbow theme. The instructions for most of the origami decorations we made can be found in this blog post: Origami Christmas Decorations. I’m sure you’ll agree the tree turned out beautifully, and it was, in fact, award winning! We won one of Dr Hannah Fry’s prizes for her mathematical Christmas decorations competition on Twitter - a copy of her book “The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus".

This year the challenge is to match last year’s success - a tall order! We’ve come up with an idea for an ‘outer space’ theme: stars and moons and planets and rockets, in golds and silvers and midnight blues. And one enthusiastic and talented student, Amber, has proposed folding a giant rocket, of her own design, for the top of the tree!

As I’ve being doing a fair amount of research into suitable folds, I thought I’d share the results here, so that others can decorate their own ‘outer space’ trees. Perfect if you’ve budding astronauts at home!

Stars

There are hundreds of beautiful origami star designs; here's a small selection of relatively straight-forward, 5-pointed, Christmassy ones.

1.        Modular 5-pointed Star by Tomoko Fuse and Nick Robinson (photo below)
Photo instructions: http://www.origami-instructions.com/easy-modular-5-pointed-star.html
Diagram: http://www.nickrobinson.info/origami/diagrams/modstar.htm

2.        5-Pointed Star (from a pentagon; see video):
Diagram: http://www.origami-resource-center.com/support-files/5pointedstar.pdf
Video: http://www.homemade-gifts-made-easy.com/5-pointed-origami-star.html
 
3.        Modular Gift Star (‘dollar star’):
Diagram: http://mvg-ori.nl/ori-l/models/ornament/moneystar.pdf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj3dgRJ3mUs

Moons

A couple of crescent moons. The first is the simpler. For the second, I decided to omit the 'man in the moon' face, and instead just tucked the redundant flap back inside the model.

1.        Moon by Fumiaki Shingu:
Diagram: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sroyG0j7Lp0/T3NoZY9LUJI/AAAAAAAAAWo/y7r_W62MLhc/s1600/moon+instruct.gif
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq2D3TorvJw

2.        Man in the Moon (photo above (modified version)):
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=hZ4Rs8mw5pI

Rockets

Gotta have some rockets!

1.        Easy Origami Rocket by Paper Kawaii
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEfK-xifwVA

2.        Origami Rocket Ship by Paper Kawaii
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ksI-OzlZ4

Planets

Trickier to find, as curved surfaces are difficult. I've opted for a couple of vaguely ball-like shapes.

1.        Stellated Octahedron by Sam Cuilla:
Diagram: http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/stellated_octahedron.pdf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwUW5QOY_ZU  

2.        Modular origami ball by Tomoko Fuse:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uISX5jP4iy0 

Little green alien!

What a find! We've absolutely got to include a few of these little chaps :)

Origami Alien by Riki Saito:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gQurMRSjzY

I'll update the post with a photo of our tree when it is complete. Happy festive folding!