- Hello, I'm Carmen. And I am a volunteer at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis. And I'd like to talk to you today about how to make some paper fans, that are very similar to Victorian times, and that make nice decorations on Christmas trees or at any other time of the year. I have two samples here. One is a complete circle fan, and this one is from a 4th of July. And then this is a paper fan for a Christmas tree, or it could be for any time of the year. The very first thing I wanna talk to you about, are the supplies that you are going to need. You will need to, select paper for your fan and today's example is going to be the sort of small Victorian fan, not the complete circle. And I pick a number of different types of paper. I find pretty Christmas paper or any kind of wrapping paper. This you'll need to flatten out a section of it in order to use it. Here's another example, this one's a silver paper. It can't be too fragile, can't be old and will, break easily. I also use a lot of the papers that they sell in craft stores these days, including wrapping paper that's a flat fold. I use old music paper that I have found that I keep. The best weight for paper would be, paper that's used in like a book or the sheet music, typing paper is good. If it's a card stock paper like this particular one, it's a little harder, but you can do it. It's folding the nice pleats that you wanna be able to do. And that's why paper such as this, music paper comes in handy. You don't want to press too hard anytime you're using any kind of paper, unless it's that heavy card stuff. So if you have a pattern or if you have a piece of paper and it doesn't have a pattern on it, because you're using typing paper or construction paper, you can decorate it using either a pretty image that you wanna draw. I'm not a very good artist. So I just, use some pencils and some magic markers and drew something. Or you can use craft stamps, and you would just take your stamp and use usual stamp pad and then you can make the design on there such as I did, using this particular stamp, okay. The other thing, I've suggested you have on hand would be a ruler so you can measure, the width of your pleats. That's real important. A pencil, something that you can lightly mark on the top and bottom of the piece of paper that you're going to cut. You could have, a pair of scissors. I would suggest, if you're a sower or you're a child whose mother sows, be sure you're not using her fabric scissors, because those are important not to use on paper. It can destroy them. I also will sometimes make my edges fancy. And for that, you need one of these edging scissors that you can get them in a craft store. Sometimes you can find them in your drawers that you've accidentally put away, but the edges make nice finishes, to your fans. Such as that first fan I showed you, I used a special, edger in order to get that flurdly image. The other thing you'll need are some little clips, for when you're gluing your fan together, or it could be a paper, a clothes pin, and this is a smaller one than most people have to hang things up in a laundry room, but they come in handy. And then for finishing touches, I sometimes use pipe, paper punches, and those create images that I attached to the fan. Or you can put on a little bow, you can look for all of these sort of supplies at places like Dollar Tree or Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Joanne's. I always go after a holiday and I pick up some supplies, some extra tidbits that I can add to my fans. Here's one that says, it is the season. I also keep any older, craft kits that I make and the little tidbits that I don't use, in that particular craft, I will keep and then I can add them to my fans if I would like, okay. So the very first thing out, the other thing you need will be some glue or a glue gun. And I would suggest if you use a glue gun that you get a low temperature glue gun, a high temperature glue gun, you can burn your fingertips and it's a little harder. One more thing. If you have washi tape that you don't know what to do with, you can use it to decorate the fans as well. It's always kind of handy, okay. So, the first step in making your fan would be to mark out the pleats that you're going to fold. And so here we go. These are a quarter mark. You can see they're along the top, and then the bottom. And then one thing I want to show you is there, I did a quarter inch pleat on this particular fan and here's a half inch pleat. And they are, a little harder to fold if you do the quarter-inch pleat, unless you have really small fingers or really delicate long fingers. So, choose wisely what kind, how large you make your pleat or how small you make your pleat, okay. You start using your piece of paper that you've marked out and you fan fold it. And that's just one, at the pleat here you would fold. And then if the bottom pleat, you would fold in. And I made this piece of paper about four inches, because it'll give me a chance when I have finished the fan fold, to decide if I wanna cut it down some, make it a little smaller fan for our little Christmas tree, or if I want to make it a large fan fold. The length of your piece of paper can vary greatly. It can go from say a five inch piece of paper. This is a six inch piece of paper to about 12 inches. And that makes a nice full fan. The one thing I wanna show you, is that after I finished folding my pleats, and I gather them up to make the fan. If my last fold, it folds up and this one had folded down, I will cut this last pleat off, so it makes a much nicer edge, so that both of the plates at the far end, are folded down. So I know I have a right way to look at the fan. You don't have to do this. I just think it makes it look nicer. And it's pretty easy to just cut that off. I dropped my scissors on the floor so let me just tear this off and show you, makes them much prettier fold, here. And then you can decide how thick you want. This is where you would add the glue down here in your fan folds. And just wherever you want, to decide to, cut below it, put the glue in there, and then I use the paper clips, to hold the fan until the glue is dry. At which point I can then take either some washi tape and wrap it around, or I'll take some ribbon, and wrap it around, a couple of times. I'll glue it in place. And then you can put a little bow on the front or little decoration. And in the back after you've cut, the length of the end that you want, you can put a hook. Now, you can make a hook out of a piece of ribbon, or I sometimes cut down, older Christmas hooks that I get and just wrap them and make it about half the size of a normal hook. And I cut it in half and then I attach it to the back of the fan. At that point, then I'll add a little ribbon, or the little snowflake, bauble that I kept from another kit. However you'd like to do it. And your fan, will make a nice presentation on your tree. Can see here, this one, it has a little ribbon hook on the back, trying to get it up for you. And that's how I finished it off. And now it can sit on my Christmas tree. Thank you for watching.