Making Your Own Book Folding Pattern 1: Basic Shapes

 Once you learn to use my technique of using striped images as a book folding pattern, you can make your own pattern.  All my patterns were made using Microsoft Word. I have a Youtube video about how to make your own patterns, but here is a Step-by-Step of how to make a basic shape pattern.

1. Open Microsoft word and click on "Insert Shape".

Select any shape you would like to make into a pattern. For this demo we will use the star shape.  Drag the corner of the shape to make it the size you want.

Left click on the shape. First select format shape.  Then on the Line option, select "no line". Then click on the Fill option. 

In the fill options, select, "pattern fill" and then select the Wide Stripes option. It is the one with the widest vertical stripes.  

This will fill your shape with vertical stripes. The way Word is set up is that it will display more or fewer striped depending how big the image is on the screen.  You will need to use the size adjustment button in the lower right to zoom in and zoom out until you have about the right number of stripes in your pattern, (somewhere between 60-120 stripes.  My star shape ended up with 90 stripes.)

Now you need to capture your shape as a picture rather than a dynamic shape.   To do this, use the snipping tool.  Use your desktop search icon (the one that looks like a magnifying glass) and type in "snipping tool."  Then click on it to open it up.

Without zooming in or out, use the mouse to drag a box over your shape.  That will capture it as a picture and save it in your computer's "clipboard" memory.  

Now, go back to your original shape and delete it.  Use the Control V to paste the clipped image into your Word document.  Now you have a shape that you can make bigger or littler and it will have the same number of stripes. There is your pattern!

You can make more complicated patterns by combining shapes.  I made the Christmas Tree pattern out of three triangle shapes.  I added the photo fame circle on my Star pattern by combining a star shape and a circle shape.