How to make Tinsel in Blender [ No Audio | No Music]

With Christmas coming up I thought I'd share my method of making tinsel in Blender! I hope everything was pretty intuitive, this is my first Blender tutorial :-)

Here are step-by-step instructions:
Step 1: Create a long narrow cylinder - make sure you subdivide it plenty of times, you want a high enough resolution so that the particles will emit evenly.
Step 2: Create the tinsel bunches with three planes. Make sure to twist/rotate them slightly so they reflect the light in a natural way.
Step 3 (Optional): Duplicate your original tinsel bunch and modify it to have thinner strips for some variation.
Step 4: Instance your tinsel bunch along the cylinder via the Particle system (to set an object as the particle, rather than strands, go under the Render tab under the particle system, and change it to your tinsel mesh)
Step 5: Tweak particle settings to your liking
Step 6 (Optional): Make a duplicate of your particle system, this time setting your second, thinner bunch as the render object
Step 7: Set up your materials for the tinsel in the shader editor (You can set each tinsel bunch to share a material, or have two independent materials for a two-tone look).
Step 8 (Optional): Add a curve, and add a curve modifier to your string mesh. This just allows you to pose the string easily, but you can also do it by going into Edit mode and using proportional editing to tweak it.

To get the best results I recommend lighting your scene with a HDRI - I get mine from https://polyhaven.com/hdris.