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.

Here is a shelf at work with my stress-relief origami. I keep a brick of the solid color paper in my desk drawer. Here is my previous entry about stellated icosahedra.

Modular origami is just right for me. You make many small pieces and then slip them together to make your shape (no tape - no glue). Give me a folding diagram for a panda and you'll get a very wrinkly piece of paper that is vaguely anthropomorphic and perhaps could be a panda, if pandas constantly tipped forwards to rest on their faces. But give me a simple Sonobe module to fold - have me fold thirty of them - and have me slip them together into a stellated icosahedron - and you get one neato ball of fun.

An icosahedron is a twenty sided polyhedron. Stellated refers to the pyramids that are on each of the twenty faces. It took me about a week to be able to say the word icosahedron without stuttering. Here is a great webpage that talks about them and how to make them. I didn't use his version of the module - the one I used was even simpler to fold.

It takes me almost an hour to make one of these. Perfect for lunch breaks where I want to unwind a little. I have four of these lovely polyhedra in black and blue that sit on either side of candles in our guest bathroom. Someday I would like to make a bazillion in big and little sizes and hang them from the ceiling over the bed. Four is a good start. :)

During our first four years together, Andrew and I would collect a rock or shell (or something like that) from each of our trips. After the first 3 or 4, I started creating what became known as the Rock Box for each of them.

The idea was each box would be a scientific display of a sample - as if we'd embarked on expeditions. On the left was the number of the rock, where it was collected, and on what date. On the right was a short narrative (usually a little goofy) about the trip or the place where we collected the rock.

I used acrylic box frames so I could construct an inset display area for the specimen. It was a craft project, science project, and architectural project all rolled into one. I had so much fun building these. I think I got up to #19 before we had our last big move.

It wasn't their first move, but it was their fatal move. UPS must be awfully hard on boxes, because every single one of the rock boxes were scratched from rubbing against each other. They were so scratched up that you couldn't see through the acrylic anymore. I saved all the paper inserts, so if I ever wanted to, I could re-construct them.

The other cool project I did with acrylic box frames involved origami paper and fortunes from fortune cookies. Sorry for the terrible scan, this project was pre-digital camera. I tucked a square of paper into a frame and layered a fortune over it. Super simple. I picked good fortunes, of course, and hung these brightly colored inspirations in my bathroom. Japanese paper and Chinese fortunes aren't necessarily congruous, but hey, they looked nice together.