Sometimes Love Is Mythical...

...like the unicorn. I keep seeing all these design blogs with all their happiness about Valentine's Day and I wonder where all the bitter girls like me are. Here's a nice papercut with some of my favorite mythical creatures, the unicorns.

Some More Alice Scherenschnitt

And you thought it was over! I cooked up one more thing for the Alice in Wonderland Tea Party papercut, this cute little placemat. Now, your tea party will be complete.

Nie Nie Auction

I don't know how many of you have heard of the many sites out there dedicated to Stephanie Nielsen's recovery. You might see a Nie Nie recovery button on your favorite craft blog every now and then. I'm a little late jumping on the band wagon, but when my friend Carina invited me to contribute to the auction occuring in Provo this Monday, I happily agreed to donate. Click on this link to find out more about the auction. Or this link.


This is what I chose to donate. My papercut piece that was inspired by my trip to London. It's of the Samuel Beckett quote, "No matter, try again. Fail again, fail better." It kind of hurts to let it go, but it's for a good cause and I hope the person who wins it will enjoy it's message.


Maybe I'll see you on Monday!

CHA

If any of you are at the Craft and Hobby Association convention, come visit me in the Making Memories booth! I'll always be there. I think I'll be demoing the whole time. Come say hi! Come tell me you stalk my blog! I love it!

Elephant on Eggshells

My first papercut of the year! My friend Kim brought over a book called Easter Eggs for Everyone. I'm not allowed to keep it, even though I really want to. Maybe I'll hide it! Anyway, they had a little article on egg dioramas and I thought that that would be the perfect frame for a papercut. What to put in it was the next question. I thought I'd put the biggest thing in the littlest container. A tiny papercut of a woman riding an elephant with a monkey on it's head. I'm not the best photographer, but I did what I could. It looks a whole lot better in real life, I promise!

Happy New Year!

It's the end of the year and you guys are obviously thinking, "Boy, Cindy, you haven't done very many squirrel papercuts." And I am hearing you.



This one is a little squirrel card that you would put in a little forest envelope. Of course, the squirrel is actually a giant squirrel with a giant nut. If he was a squirrel of proper proportions to the trees, there wouldn't be much space to write on anything!



Happy New Year everyone! May you be happy and successful with all you do!

Tea Party Place Cards

So, maybe when you throw your Alice in Wonderland Tea Party, you want to make sure that everyone sits in a certain spot (only to change seats periodically throughout the meal). You'll want to have place cards that match, right? Right. These are a little more simple to create than the actual centerpiece, but these little papercut place cards will add the right touch to your party. Plus, since you didn't spend as much time on then, you won't care if people spill stuff all over them!

Tea Party Table Decoration

So, say you're having a tea party for some friends and you want to have a fun theme. Wouldn't a nice Alice in Wonderland theme go well for that party? Here's a papercut I did that will hopefully go in a book on how to papercut that will come out sometime in the fall. On one side we have the Hatter pouring Alice some tea. On the other, the rabbit and his clock and the snoozing dormouse. They stand neatly in the middle of your table. I might consider laminating them.

Deer Me

More experimenting with 3d papercuts. I've had these shadow boxes from IKEA for years and never have used them. I finally got around to it and painted the inside blue and the outside gold and made a deer papercut for Jake for Christmas. I think he liked it.

House of Fergusons

This was my friend Andi's idea. Do you look at this blog, Andi? You should, it's my better blog. If you don't, that's good too because then you don't know that I'm stealing your idea. I suppose this counts as cutting paper too since I'm gluing printed family photos to cardstock, cutting them out, putting divots in them and making a house of cards.



More regular paper cutting to be seen after this!

And Again...

So I made another one. I really like Martha Stewart's glitter. It's really pretty.

Glitter Obsession

So I've kind of been obsessed with glitter ever since I did those little glitter ornaments. It's so pretty. One of my co-workers, Audre, did a trend trip to New York and picked up this really cute little hanging dangly thing:



I thought, "Heck! I can do that," and so I tried it and I think it turned out rather nice. Technically it's not a papercut since I didn't use my own skills to cut anything. I used Making Memories' new die-cutting machine, the Slice, to cut out the stars, their grommet hole punch to cut out a big hole and a smaller hole punch to cut out the letters.


I think I'd like to make more with other cheesy words like dream or believe and hang a ton or them from the ceiling in my bathroom. These would be so pretty for a wedding, too.

Christmas Ornament Redux

So I decided that the eggs would be too hard to ship and so I'd just give them to friends and family. But now I have a dilemma. I'm a week behind in my sending of these ornaments and I still want to do something cute. So last night I buckled down and made 5 different designs and glittered them. I can't send them out today because I learned that you need to spray hairspray over the glitter to get it to stay on better when I went in to work. I like how they turned out!

The Squirrel!


The Hedgehog!


The Wily Fox!


The Snowflake Loving Seahorse!


The Quail!


Merry Christmas you guys!

Christmas Ornaments

So last night, in order to cut all these out and glue them to the eggs and modge podge over the top of the eggs, I watched the end of Anchorman, all of Talledega Nights, all of the Wedding Singer and all of Just Friends. I made these for an Ornament Swap for people online and I kind of don't want to give them out anymore, but I'm way late in sending them out so I think I have to! They are pretty nice. My friend Cassian helped me paint them on Thursday. It's been quite the long process. I'll post the finished product picture tomorrow!

Kissing Not Required

A few years ago, okay, maybe ten, I was roommates with this amazing artist (and super good friend), Kelly. At a certain point in time, she was transfixed with the Grimm's fairytale, The Frog Prince. Her research into the story showed her that in the end, the princess did NOT kiss the frog in any version that she read, instead, she treated him badly, ignored him and threw him against the wall. In return, he married her and made her his queen. Men are so strange! Anyway, my computer broke this weekend and I found myself with an amazing amount of time and so I made this 3D papercut of the Frog Prince. The above shot is the box closed, the bottom is with it opened.



I covered the box with paper, but if I had to do it all over again, I would just paint it. I don't know why I didn't paint it in the first place. Hope you are all well!

Thanksgiving

I drew this illustration a few months ago. There's this website called Illustration Friday and I subscribe to their newsletter. They have a different topic every Friday that you have a week to illustrate. The topic for that week was "fierce." I drew the fiercest thing I could think of. I think it also works well as a Thanksgiving papercut. The amount of time it took me to cut this out was exactly the amount of time it took me to listen to my friends Nathaniel and Rob's podcast, The Gentle Tyrants. I don't think I'm going to have a lot of time to post anything over the Thanksgiving holiday because my parents live in the middle of nowhere and only have a landline and that's pretty much like life without running water for me so I thought I'd post this now. Happy Thanksgiving!

Snow White and Rose Red

I think I like too many fairy tales. One of my favorites is of Snow White and Rose Red (different than just the regular Snow White). This is a tale of two sisters who befriend a bear that has been enchanted by an evil dwarf. The only way the enchantment can be lifted is if the dwarf dies. The way I remember it is that the spell dissolves when the dwarf's beard has been cut 3 times. The wikipedia version tells it differently. I drew this papercut en route from Dallas to Salt Lake. I think I would like to revisit it another time. It's a good first draft though.

Custom Christmas Papercut

So, a little while ago, a woman contacted me on Etsy and asked if I did custom papercuts. I told her I did and she asked if I would do a profile of her and her family for her Christmas card. She send me pictures of herself, her husband and son and their dog and parrot. I thought it would be fun to have a parrot in a pear tree (hopefully people catch on that that's what it is when they see it). Kim liked the idea and we went forward with it. We both loved the result! I'm also getting one of Kim's Sweet Little Yeti Christmas Ornaments. It's to die for, you guys should check out her site!

Hedgehog Love

He wanted to tell her in so many ways that he loved her, but he was short and fat and prickly and he didn't know how she would respond.

Brüderchen und Schwesterchen Print

I realized that I never made a print of one of my favorite papercuts, Brother and Sister. This Grimm's fairy tale tells of a brother and sister fleeing from their wicked witch stepmother. The brother becomes enchanted by the witch and turns into a deer. Eventually a handsome prince comes and saves the sister and kills the witch. So classic.

Etsy site!