Star Wars Origami X-Wing Fighter Tree Ornament

For our very first Christmas together nearly five years ago, the Christmas tree we bought for Jonathan’s apartment was woefully empty. We didn’t have any ornaments and we were short on funds for decorations. So we had to get creative.

I was working at the Kings County Library as a Librarian Assistant at the time, and every now and then we’d get book donations that we didn’t need, and they wouldn’t sell at the annual book sell, so they’d get tossed in the rubbish bin. That’s when I’d gleefully swoop down on them, (no, you don’t get it.. sometimes like, literally climbing in the dumpsters like some literary hobo) and I’d bring them home to rummage through and sort and pile and collect. My locker, my car, my home, just kept piling up with books that I’d do nothing with but hover over like some possessive mythical book hoarding dragon. (At least that’s how I pictured myself. Sounds way cooler than “pointless and obsessive book junkie”.)

Now, we had SO MANY BOOKS stacked up in teetering piles around the apartment, and most of them were worthless things like old dictionaries – not collectable old, just brittle paged, outdated old. And at the time I was interested in making paper crafts like flowers and junk, so these books were pretty much fair game to my artsy shenanigans.

There’s something about paper projects being made on sheets with font that just look soooo cool. I don’t get it, but it’s like, a DIY craftsy fact. So anyway, while we were toying around making paper cranes and junk one day, we decided to hang a few in our decoration-less tree. And they looked pretty cool! But then cranes got boring, so we started Googling other shapes and designs. That’s when we stumbled upon the marvel of Star Wars origami. 

So, that first Christmas, looking at our naked tree, we decided that what our mini twinkle light galaxy needed, was a mini fleet of the primary interceptor and dogfighters of the Rebel Alliance and New Republic. That’s right. Origami X-Wing Fighters.

There are a couple of tutorials / directions floating around in Internet space, but Jonathan has found that this PDF file from Instructables is the easiest and best illustrated.

This year, with all of our Christmas ornaments we’ve since collected being far, far away in a storage unit in California, we’re back to having an empty tree again. So we thought, why not do what we did the first time?! (After all, I did say I wanted ornament making to be a yearly Christmas tradition!) And because we loved the storybook text look of our originals, I splurged on a paperback dictionary from the Dollar Store for the pages. Yeeeeeah, I’m ballin’.

Anyway, to turn them into ornaments, once you get your mini fleet assembled, simply get some thick embroidery thread on a needle, double knot the end, and then feed it through the middle of the main body – where it punctures the very center of the “X”. Tie it off and it’s ready to hang, perfectly balanced and ready for action. Pew pew! Pew pew! < — (space battle!)

It’s less geek chic, but if you get a chance, check out the other DIY Christmas tree ornament we made last week – Tessa’s first Christmas footprint ornament.

So, what’s YOUR favorite DIY Christmas tree ornament?! ^_^