A friend of ours gave us a snowflake Christmas ornament many years ago, and I’ve always wanted to make one myself. I decided to try this year, using some leftover oak I had in the shop. I had a very hard time finding good information on the about these, so I also decided to write up a bit of a tutorial.

Here’s the final result:

To make the snowflakes, we’ll use 3/4 inch thick wood, because it’s easy to come by. You can use any thickness you want, you’ll just have to scale your work up or down to match.

Start by setting your table saw blade to 30 degrees and making some diamond shaped rods. It’s important that the face of the diamond is side-grain, NOT end-grain. For example, cut the rods across the grain of a 1×4 rather than ripping long strips off the edges. The diamond face should have grain lines going across it (shown below). If the length of the rods have grain going down them, the face is end-grain and it tears and splinters when you do any of the next steps. Even on a very hard wood like maple I couldn’t get end-grain to work.

If you use 3/4 inch thick material, then each faces of the rod is roughly 7/8 of an inch. Mine were very slightly smaller than that because my stock was slightly thinner. The critical part here is that all four faces are exactly the same length.

The 30 degree setting is touchy. Try cutting 6 sample rods from some cheap wood like a pine 1×4. Assemble them in a snowflake shape (look at pictures further on in the instructions) and see if they fit with no gaps. If there’s a gap, increase or decrease the angle of the saw a tiny bit and try again. I usually had to adjust and re-try this step three or four times to get the angle exactly right. Once you get the angle correct, tighten the blade in place and make lots of rods, because the blade setup is the most time consuming finicky part of the whole operation.

Once you have your rods, it’s time to make them interesting. This plan is for a simple-looking snowflake using only the table saw. If you use a router you could use different bits and make many more interesting shapes.

I created a jig to help this process by cutting the edge off a 1×4 using the 30 degree angle blade, and then attaching a scrap piece of hardboard to one side. Lower the saw blade below the table, clamp the jig to the fence, and raise the blade up through the hardboard about 1/8 of an inch. This makes a nice custom zero-clearance table surface. For the first cut, the distance from the blade to the jig should be about half the width of the rod.

Slide the rods along the jig to cut a notch along each side.

Then move the jig so the same cut is made, quite close to the edge of the rod. Turn the rod over and do this last cut again, so the two cuts end up taking the point off the one edge of the rod.

Then start gluing and clamping pairs of rods together, with the missing corners together. These missing corners will make the hole in the center of the snowflake.

When the pairs are dry, unclamp and then test fit the pairs in groups of three.

Gluing and clamping is difficult, so we’ll do it in two more steps. First glue and clamp two pairs together. I needed two clamps to do this properly.

When they are dry, add the third pair. If there are gaps when they go together, you can adjust the fit by lightly sanding the loose piece. If the gaps are too large, you need to toss these out, adjust the 30 degree saw blade and try again. There’s no good way to repair a bad fit at this stage. Clamping was difficult so I used “plastic twine”, which is like stretchy plastic wrap.

Once they are all dry, I added some more decoration by putting a hole down through the center of each rod. It’s far easier to do this now than when the rods were not glued together.

The next step involves slicing snowflakes off of this bundle of rods, like cutting cookies off a roll of dough. I made a sliding jig for my bandsaw, if you have a nice bandsaw square that would do fine. I don’t.

Cut the slices to whatever thickness you like, mine are about 1/4 inch thick. Expect to lose the first slice, because the ends of the rods won’t be perfectly even, and expect to lose a few slices worth of wood at the end because it’s quite difficult to slice 1/4 inch slices off of a tiny piece of wood. I usually toss out the first 1/4 inch and the last inch of any bundle of rods I make.

Sand the faces of the snowflakes on a disk sander, or lay them on a table and use a palm sander.

And voila, ready for finish and string! (Yeah, this one has a tiny gap.. sigh)

I finished my oak snowflakes in a nice stain to emphasize the grain. You can clearcoat them with varathane, or finish them however else you want.

Here’s a prototype for my next design. I used a router to make the notches along the rods rather than the table saw. It makes aligning the rods a bit more difficult (this one is a bit sloppy) but I like the overall effect. It looks more like a snowflake and less like a star.

Have questions or suggestions? Let me know.

Make some? Post pictures!

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1. How to Make a Crosscut Sled