My First Papercut Piece

This year one of my biggest goals has been to try new crafts and learn new skills, and one of the things I've been wanting to try for years is papercutting. I adore paper and ephemera so paper crafts have always been very near to my heart, but I'd been put off trying papercutting as I cannot draw to save my life, so wasn't sure how I'd go about creating a design to cut out. Well, a few weeks ago I somehow stumbled across printable papercutting templates on Etsy! Created by a huge range of papercut artists from all over the world, there are designs to suit any style. Obviously I immediately purchased this one, and then got stuck in. Basically you just print the design out on to whichever paper you choose - I used 120gsm white printer paper which seemed to work well. The design is reversed, and the areas to cut away are grey. Simple!

 I thought I had picked a fairly simple design which would be easy to complete - I was very wrong! Curves are THE hardest thing to cut and, as you can see, this design is made up of mainly curved lines. You live and you learn though. The flowers were all meant to have cut out centres, but I took the creative decision to only cut out some of them and leave others solid (basically it was too fiddly for my below average scalpel skills and I was worried I'd mess it up!)

 I'm actually really pleased with how it turned out - it took me an evening to complete, during which I listened to half of the Serial podcast (seriously, how good is it?!) My lines are pretty wobbly and I don't think I changed the blade as often as I should have because I felt like I was being wasteful just throwing them away. But I've already bought about half a dozen more templates, and am excited to get stuck in and (hopefully) improve along the way!