Cool Off With A Paper Fan

I grew up in West Texas, so you’d think I’d be impervious to hot weather. It wasn’t just “fry an egg on a sidewalk” hot there. It was so hot that Dad kept a pot holder in the car so he could grasp the silver metal transmission lever and shift out of park when the car had been sitting outside in the sun for a couple of hours.

It didn’t bother me as a kid, nor as a teen-ager. But I moved away, to several different climates, and over time I’ve really begun to more than just not like the heat. Hate is an ugly word, but I’m close.

Two choices here – be unhappy all the time, or stay inside and do a little crafting! A paper fan is an easy choice for a hot afternoon project.

This paper fan is super easy – no special cutting machines or real talent involved. If you can fold a sheet in half and use a staple gun, you are all set! (Or as you’ll read below, even if you have a little trouble with the staple gun, it will all work out OK).

To create the artwork for your paper fan, you can use either a high end graphics program like I normally do (Adobe is the trade industry standard), or you can do this in something a little more mainstream like Microsoft Word.

You’ll want to set up a document to be legal size in whatever your choice of software is. You can create a paper fan from a letter size piece of paper, but it will be a little small, and most home inkjet printers can do legal. If you have a printer that can do tabloid, that would be even better, but I’m sticking with the more common size here.

Either type in your phrase, or place your artwork. I’ve gone with a funny little saying I put in my Etsy store. I’ve freezer paper stenciled a t-shirt and shorts set to use as pajamas during the summer with the phrase.

The trickiest part of this paper fan project is you want the art/text to take up just about half of the sheet. And then you want to duplicate that artwork and flip it upside so you have two of them. I did this in InDesign, but instructions for Microsoft Word are here and it’s pretty straightforward.

It’s super important that the tops of the artwork/text meet in the middle of the page. That’s going to become the top of the paper fan.

I went a little crazy and added a colored background to mine. In fact, I went triple crazy and duplicated the page and set up three different “hot” colors. You could also print this on colored stock to get the same effect without using as much ink.

Print this on the heaviest legal size paper your printer can handle. To be honest, I couldn’t find any thick legal size paper around the house, so I cut a couple of sheets of 12 x 18 paper down and fed them to my printer following the instructions for heavy paper (mine won’t feed heavy stock from the tray; it has to go through a slot in the back).

Once it is printed, carefully fold the sheet in half so it lines up perfectly even. In my case, I had some white edges where the background wouldn’t print so I just trimmed those off so I had edge to edge color.

I used a thick piece of chipboard as my handle, but I’ve also done these with paint stirring sticks. I’m a very big “use what you have crafter.”

Position the handle up into the folded card, and after making sure it is centered left to right, use the staple gun to hold everything together.

Pro Tip: You might consider checking to see if the staples loaded in your staple gun are thicker than the handle. Because if that happens, you may inadvertently staple your fan to the carpet on the back porch.

After carefully prying it free, I just used a hammer to close the staples completely. I wouldn’t share that fan with a small child, and the next two I made with the smaller staples turned out much better!

Pin this for a hot afternoon!

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