I’m sorry we haven’t been updating the site much recently. We haven’t done very much that’s post worthy since Halloween.
It is the time of year where we start preparing for Christmas, though. Since we started doing an annual video, preparation for Christmas starts around the first of October, when I drag out the music and start searching for the right song to accompany the video. So far, I’ve found a few songs that might be OK, but nothing that has knocked my socks off yet.
Cece and I had a kirigami (cut paper patterns like snowflakes) fest over the weekend that worked out pretty well. I bought a book from Barnes & Noble with some simple patterns to cut and since Cece and I were home all alone on Saturday afternoon, we decided to try it.
We made some interesting stuff. Airplane snowflakes, Elephants, Celtic crosses and so forth. Cece had a little trouble at first cutting the patterns, but once she got started (and I started drawing the patterns on the paper for her), it was hard to get her to stop.
(All of these were made by Cece except the blue cross and the red and white snowflake, which I made.)
The most interesting thing we made was a simple 3D snowflake made from 6 pieces of 6″x6″ origami paper. The result was so impressive that Sadie and Carissa had to make their own on Sunday and Sandi wants to string some across the kitchen as a decoration this year. I was going to post some pictures, but the girls took them to give to their teachers this morning. I’ll put some up after we make the next batch.
By the way, I found this interesting site while researching kirigami on the web.
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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we found a simple pattern to make 3D snowflakes. We made several, and the girls gave them all away to their teachers. They’ve been a real hit at the schools, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of them being made by local school children in the near future.
We decided to make a few more to use as Christmas decorations and hang them in the house for our Gingerbread party tomorrow.
Here’s what they look like:
We also made one by using two different types of wrapping paper an interweving them. It looks really neat, but the wrapping paper we chose isn’t stiff enough to hang up, so it’s been relegated to being a table decoration. 
Update: If you are interested in making your own snowflake, you can get the pattern and instructions here: The 3D Kirigami Snowflake Pattern
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Hi, welcome to the Atherton Family Notes.
This blog is intended to be about the events happening in our family, but occasionally we post items of more general interest.
The particular Athertons in question are: Ken Atherton, Sandi Atherton, Carissa Atherton, Celia Atherton, and Sadie Atherton. All of the posts are written by one of the five of us.
This site has been active since late December 2008, but contains posts from the previous incarnation of Atherton Family Notes which was hosted at wordpress.com. We actually got a lot more traffic over there because we were integrated with the wordpress.com tag system, which meant that you could click on any tag on anyone’s blog and potentially see a link to our blog, which was a nice feature. However, there were lots of things we couldn’t control on that site, so we moved to our own privately hosted site. Our favorite addition is the little feedjit.com widget over on the right side, which shows the traffic that hits our site from all around the world. Over time, we’ve seen hits from every continent but Antarctica. 
Here are some links to the most popular tags on our blog:
Kirigami – This link includes the most popular page on the whole blog, the (semi-)famous 3d kirigami snowflake pattern. Between it’s brief stint on wordpress.com and it’s new location here, it’s generated about 2000 hits since December 2008. If you search for “kirigami pattern” on Google, this page appears in the 6th and 9th slot out of about 43,000 results as of January 2008, making it pretty popular in its niche. If you visit the comments, there is a link to a site showing how to make this project without a Cricut as well.
Sure-Cuts-A-Lot – We bought a Cricut electronic cutting machine in mid-2008 and it has become one of our favorite crafting tools. It’s even better when used with the program called Sure-Cuts-A-Lot (available here), which allows you to create your own patterns to use. We’ve shared a few projects for this already and will be adding more soon.
Digital Scrapbooking, Paper Scrapbooking – Ken, Carissa, Celia, and Sadie have taken an interest in scrapbooking over the last few years and we’ve been posting the results. Ken works mainly in digital and the girls like cutting and pasting.
Germany – While we’ve all spent most of our lives living in Indianapolis, we did live overseas for a few years. During our first stint in Germany, we maintained a site called “Survivor Germany”. We have archived as many of these old posts as we could find on this site as well.
France – Our second overseas stint was in France. We haven’t yet posted very many of the posts we wrote at this time, but we’re working on it. This tag also includes some travelling we did in France while living in Germany.
We have made an annual Christmas video since 2000 and since 2002, we’ve also made an accompanying website. Most of these sites are currently unavailable on the internet, but two of them are still around:
The Atherton’s 2008 Christmas Website
The Athertons’s 2007 Christmas Website
Thanks for visiting and feel free to comment about anything you see!
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Note: If you find this pattern interesting, I recommend that you buy the book Kirigami by Jeffrey Rutzky from Barnes and Noble. It’s our original source for this project and an excellent introduction to an interesting craft that is tons of fun to do as a family.
I’ve taken the 3D kirigami snowflake pattern that we’ve talked about a few times on our blog, and I’ve created a pattern that can be used in a Cricut expression to make the cuts needed for the pattern out of 12×12 sheets of scrapbook paper. Below, I’ve posted the pattern so that you can make the snowflakes yourself if you have a Cricut Expression and Sure-Cuts-A-Lot.
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