I initially came by this cute tutorial by Lisa Snellings (whose sculptures are incredible, to no one's surprise) when I was trying to search up an easy umbrella design since making an umbrella with clay would be too heavy for my little sculpture figurine to hold. I only made a few small changes to the design to fit my own art style. Let's get to it.
1) Cut out a circle of desired size. A small one for mice. A life sized one to carry around with you and pretend you're a paper doll. The possibilities are endless.
2) Fold circle into eight sections by folding it in half again and again and again (this must be folded that exact amount of "agains" it's very important)
3) To trim the edges neatly, I drew some guidelines from point to point but you can certainly eye-ball it.
4) Admire your work and take a 5 hour lunch break
5) When you get back thoroughly stuffed, cut along one of the folds until you reach the center
6) Overlap that sucker and glue it down strong.
7) OPTIONAL: At this stage I still felt that the umbrella was a little too flat so I lightly pressed some of the sections between my thumbs to create a fold (as shown above). Do this for all eight sections. There's no real precision for this step, just eye-ball it and see which fold works best. In this case I did two examples, with the first having folds closer the the center, and the second one a little farther.
8) Paint the desired color and stick the handle through the center. You can use a toothpick or a thick wire if you want a curved handle. To help make it easier to get the stick through, use a push pin to poke a hole in the center before pushing it through. Finally, use some gloss varnish on the top to give it that "wet" look.
And you're done!
In Lisa's tutorial she has a smaller circle on the underside of the umbrella for support but even though I skipped this step, I found that it still held up pretty well. Even so, I suggest that you add some glue for extra security.
