Virusflakes – Part 1


kestrel has made some lovely viral decorations and she shared with us some pictures. Enjoy!


Marcus posted a PDF (under the title, “Let’s Go Viral”) that had these wonderful images you could print out and cut up to make virusflakes. I don’t know about the rest of you but the last two years have really hampered my ability to create, so this was a wonderful tonic to help me through a tough time. Here is the link to the PDF: -click-

To start out, just choose an image you find appealing and print it. It will look something like this:

© kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Next, you cut out the square. I actually ended up cutting around the dotted circle, after I tried a few and found out how it all worked. Once you have done that you just fold on the lines (they turn out better if you are as accurate as you can be in your folding) with the printed image on top. I printed mine out on a very tough tracing type paper, almost like parchment paper. I could see through the paper fairly well to fold it, yet it was much stronger than usual tracing paper. After that, you just start cutting out the image.

© kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I found that using a very small and really sharp pair of scissors worked the best. Each virus comes with an information sheet about that particular one; this can be educational as well as a fun activity. I certainly learned a lot more about viruses than I had known before.

OK, so what do they look like? Well, even the “worst” viruses are really beautiful. We will start with Coronavirus.

© kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This next one is not actually a virus but it acts like one. This is the RNA vaccine:

© kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And this is what happens to the Coronavirus when it runs into the antibodies caused by the above particle:

© kestrel, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

As they say, this is what the end of a pandemic looks like.

To be continued…

 

Comments

  1. Jazzlet says

    Oooh I love them! I wanted to make them, but I don’t seem to have any suitable paper, so it’s lovely to see how they turned out.

  2. Ice Swimmer says

    I used to love making those kinds of cut paper thingies as a kid. None of them were viruses or as elaborate as these however.

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