Paper Doily Snowflakes {fun Christmas craft}

In today’s post: Learn how to cut snowflakes from paper doilies from the dollar store. They’re easy enough for kids to make and they turn out beautiful!

Cutting paper snowflakes has been one of my favorite Christmas traditions since I was a kid. I grew up near Seattle, where it doesn’t snow much – winter is often a near constant drizzle. So my mom taught us how to cut snowflakes and then we’d tape them all over our windows to make it feel a little more Christmas like.

I’ve already shared a post that teaches you how to cut snowflakes from paper and includes some printable snowflake templates. But this year we’ve put a new twist on our paper snowflakes: we are using paper doilies from the dollar store.

Paper doilies work great for making snowflakes!

• They’re the perfect weight for folding and cutting because they are lighter than normal printer paper, which makes them even easier to use.
• The scalloped edge makes it super easy to fold in 12ths to make a six (or 12) sided snowflake.
• And the laser cut design around the outside makes the snowflakes look extra fancy.

Paper Doily Snowflake Supplies

All you need to make doily snowflakes are some paper doilies and a pair of scissors. I found these multipacks of doilies at my local dollar store:

The largest and second largest size doilies have 12 arches or “scallops” around the outside, which makes them perfect for folding into snowflakes. The two smaller sizes only have 10 arches, so they won’t work. That means you’ll be able to fold and cut 16 snowflakes from one pack of dollar store doilies.

You can leave the outer edge of the doily alone, like this one:

I think that looks really pretty, but my teenagers think that doesn’t look enough like a snowflake. They prefer to cut along the edge so you end up with six points or sides, like this one:

FUNNY SIDE NOTE: In my original paper snowflakes post, the method I show creates an 8-sided snowflake, simply because it’s much easier for kids to learn how to fold paper in 8ths instead of 6ths. But BOY DID THAT MAKE PEOPLE MAD! I can’t tell you how many comments and messages I got telling me that I had no right to call those snowflakes! and that I apparently don’t know how to count. It appears that paper snowflakes are a serious business, so it’s a good thing the doily version will give you six sides instead of eight 😉

How to Cut Paper Doily Snowflakes

You can watch this quick video to see how to fold and cut a doily snowflake. Written instructions follow.