Lucky stars are so cool. Last summer I was obsessed with origami. I stumbled across Lucky Stars when I was searching the internet for a star folding pattern. I was intrigued. I took some catalogs and cut strips like the website I discovered explained. I was hooked! The tiny stars are so cute. I made them in all sorts of sizes and colors. My desk was littered with them.

That Fall, in Montreal's Chinatown where I was hunting for Pocky*, I saw a small basket full of Lucky Star Strips. They were a dollar a pack (about 150 strips). I knew from the web that it was a great deal. I bought all the packs of hologram pastels (5 or 6 packs) and then I picked up 2 packs of the strips pictured above.

I used up all the hologram pastel strips right away. I was a Lucky Star Factory for about a month. Everyone and their mother had a pile of shiny stars from me. When I got to these strips I didn't really like the way they came out when the printed side was showing. I started making them with the white side showing. I was ecstatic when I discovered blobs of glow-in-the-dark paint on the back of the strip!  Too cool.

The paper made for lucky stars is thicker than magazine/catalog paper and soooo much easier to work with. If you make your own strips, be sure to make them pretty long compared to their width. The more times your strip gets folded around, the better the star will puff up when you press in the sides. The hardest part for me was figuring out the mechanics of tying a knot in a strip of paper. Once you get that, you're golden.

* If you are a fan of Engrish.com, check out Glico's site. Here is some Pocky marketing copy from the site, "Glico's various unique ideas incorporated in its confectionery establish exciting new directions for chocolate products." I'm a huge fan of Japanese companys' fearless use of English on their products, whether it's funny, weird, or unexplainable.