Another month, another project! I’m sharing my Try Something New Every Month (TSNEM) project- this month’s ‘theme’ was papercraft. You can see more about the year-long adventure and what else I’ve tried in this post. I tried out papercutting – which is exactly what it sounds like.
I used a traditional X-ACTO knife and the blade felt so unwieldy. I have been looking at options on Amazon but I’d love to hear if you have ever used something with a smaller blade that might work with paper cutting! I initially was interested in this one* but I am not sure I can get past the “for women” angle with the pink and all, insert eyeroll here. I attempted to cut through my printed photo and cut the cardstock underneath, but couldn’t create enough pressure.
I usually spend a fair amount of time researching whatever I’m planning on trying each month, looking up masters of the craft, and tutorials. This month really got away from me with lots of family events and the holidays, so I just dove right in! I also followed this “All About Papercutting” blog on Instagram, what a neat feed!
It hadn’t occurred to me until I was already done, that you can buy papercutting patterns! Etsy had a ton of really cool ones*; Craftsy only had a couple but I really liked this quirky “treehouse” design*. For my own attempt, I used one of our family pictures. We had several silhouette style photos to choose from and I decided to photoshop two together, that had the most striking silhouettes. Well, turns out I made it so it was two of my daughter’s silhouette, instead of her and my son! Whoops. To create the picture, I used Picmonkey* to bump up the contrast and change it to black and white.
I layered it over some scrapbooking paper, cut out the second daughter (ha!), and framed it. It looks better than I expected! But I definitely have a lot of work to do. I’m intrigued to try this again some time, especially after looking through some of the patterns, and requested two of the books I linked above from our local library! Have you tried paper cutting?