A big project deserves a big post

My parents both turned 60 last year. My sister and I decided that, to celebrate, we would both come for a visit (with my boyfriend and her husband in tow) and cook them dinner. That sounds a little boring, but this wasn't just any dinner! We created custom menus for each of them - a "for him" and "for her" menu based on their favorite foods. It was pretty work intensive, took a lot of planning, and was a lot of fun. The two of us (three if you count my little nephew that was, at the time, in her belly!) and our men went shopping and made the whole meal, and it all came out great.

That was the easy part.

Since we did the dinner closer to my dad's birthday in January, we also gave my dad his present at the dinner. My sister and I both like doing DIYs, so we decided it would be great to make something together for him. My dad is kind of hard to get gifts for because he knows what he wants, and he goes out and gets them himself! Not to mention that the things he likes are generally out of my price range, since it's usually whatever the newest technology is.

Well, we decided that since he loves his technology, and since he also travels very often, we would make him something that would incorporate both those things. After much Pinterest searching and emails between the two of us, my sister and I decided that we would make him a binder where he could cleanly store all of his cords and techie items when he travels, to avoid things getting tangled and keep everything in one place. A tutorial on how to make the book can be found here.

My sister, as I've mentioned, has the sewing ability between the two of us. Not to mention a sewing machine. So she took on the task of creating the actual book. As it turned out, this was much more difficult than anticipated, and I'm glad it was her, not me!

We of course wanted to personalize the gift, and that's where I came in. We decided that I would do a paper cut, or two or three, to cover the front, back and spine of the book. Since it was for travel, I decided to do a map of the world for the cover, names of cities my dad has been to for the back, and then treat the spine like it was a real title of a book. Once I finished the 3 cuts, I sent them off to my sister who mod-podged them onto the outside of the book.

All went fine except for that stinking map. See, when I make a papercut, I draw out the design in pencil and then cut around it. When I'm done cutting there are often pencil marks left over that need to be erased. However, you have to be so careful when erasing because, once cut, the paper can be very delicate. That was the case with a map, and on the first papercut I ended up ruining it when I tried to erase the pencil lines. So another technique if you don't want pencil is to just flip it over and the back becomes the front. Well that of course means that whatever you draw will get reversed, and that doesn't work out too well when you're doing something like words or a map. I also don't own a light box (my next purchase!), and so there I was, free-handing a map of the world, backwards. It took a LOT of fine-tuning to get it to actually look like the world, but I have to say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Pictures of the finished product in all its glory and angles below.

That darned map:

The back of the book:

The inside - you can really see my sister's amazing handiwork here!

The whole outside, including the spine:

Getting the Hang of It

This is a papercut card I made for my sister's birthday. Can you guess how old she was turning? I don't have a picture of it after it was backed, but I mounted it on silver tissue paper. I like the way papercuts look unmounted as well, but with cards it's hard because you want to be able to write on the inside, but doing that can ruin the silhouette.

The design for this card was original.

A First Papercut

Thanks to everyone who has checked out my blog so far! Don't forget to "follow" so you can see posts as I upload them!

So this post shows my first real papercut card. I had done a couple of small ones before this, but those were more like testing the waters. This is the first one that I really put effort in to, and actually gave to someone.

I made this card for my cousin Jeff's wedding. I wish I could take credit for the adorable design, but it's a copy of a design by papercut artist Rob Ryan.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the card after I had backed the papercut, so the design doesn't quite stand out and looks a little rough in this picture. I ended up backing it with silver tissue paper to add to the whole wedding effect. I also learned from this that papercuts look best when the picture is not so up close!

You can see, though, that there are some rough lines in there. It's actually intentional. Well I mean, I don't think I could get them too much cleaner if I tried, but I also wouldn't want to. A lot of papercut artists will make one design by hand and then laser cut a bunch from those. That results in very clean lines. Personally, I like being able to see that it was hand cut, and I while I try to make my papercuts as clean as possible, I'm glad for the imperfections.

A New Blog

HI! Welcome to my blog, where I hope to showcase the products of my hobby: card making and other paper art.

I should start out by saying that most of my life I have pretty devoid of any artistic ability. It was always a bit frustrating, as my mom is a very talented artist. She used to draw outlines of scenes for me to color in a child, and has made some amazing water colors for my sister and me over the years. The artistic gene didn't skip over my sister, either. She can knit a mean dog bandana!

Well, I'd always been pretty sure that gene skipped right over me. In many ways, it did. I can't draw for the life of me. Even my stick figures don't look like stick figures. I've tried painting with acrylics, oils, and water colors, I've tried sketching with pencil and charcoal, I've tried knitting and scrap booking. And every time, they've come out looking like they probably did back when I was five and couldn't color in the lines of my mom's outlines. And interestingly, my mom's reaction to those works has always been the same as it was back then as well ("I love it honey, they're beautiful!" They weren't).

Well, I can't really claim that things have changed so much. I still can't draw or paint or knit or what have you. But over the past few years I've discovered that by working with paper, I can actually create things that people OTHER than my mom seem to like. Honestly, I started making cards simply because I'm cheap and lazy and didn't feel like walking 7 blocks to a CVS to buy one. But over the years, I've developed new techniques and learned a lot from paper artists I find online. You can see an obvious progression of my cards and my other paper works. They start out pretty simple and not so great, and using techniques such as collaging. Where I'm at now is a heavy interest in paper-cutting, as well as other 3 dimensional aspects and incorporating other materials, such as buttons, into my work.

I should note that while much of my work is original, a number of my designs are not. In the cases where they are not original, or where they were heavily inspired by other works, I have included a link to those other works.

So, to start this blog off, I've put up a couple of examples of my earliest cards, which are not only very simple, but they're not that interesting or well done, either. Unfortunately I wasn't wise enough to take pictures of all of the works I've done, so there are many gaps here. On that note, if I have given you a card and you still have it, please send me a picture of it so I can include it!

Since I've been doing this work for a few years now, this blog will probably start of heavy and then slow down as the posts catch up with where I'm actually at.

I'm also happy to include tutorials or materials needed, if requested.

Enjoy!

Oh, and I'll probably throw in a few pictures of my dog George here and there. Just for good measure.

One of my very first cards. Simple collaging with straight lines.

I made this argyle-style card for Father's Day a few years ago. It would've been better had I had a circle cutter for the little circles. I have a hard time coming up with "manly" designs for cards for my dad, and argyle was my go at that. Not so sure how well that worked out, but luckily he's my dad so he had to like it.

As I said, my sister can knit a mean dog bandana!