Papercutting

I have always loved silhouettes and similar style pictures, so when my friend Rachel and I decided to go to the Papercutting course at The Make Lounge in London, I was very excited!

The course is taught by the fabulous Poppy Chancellor, who had set up a picture outline for us to practise on and then a choice of picture outline that we could be a little bit more precise with!

This is the one I picked:

I was really pleased with how it came out, even if I can't take credit for the design :)

We then did a design of our own making. As you can see in Rachel's blog, hers came out really well! Mine was less so, as I took longer over the picture above. :)

However, when I got home, I had been bitten by the bug, and decided to make a papercut Christmas card for my Mum.

All you need to do something similar is a cutting mat, scalpel, paper (normal to thick paper probably best, card is much harder) and a pencil to draw a design with. Then something to mount it on - in all cases here I used a thick paper.

So first I drew a design. There isn't a lot of designs or templates around, but I found a picture to sort-of-copy. I actually drew it backwards so that I wouldn't have to erase my pencil marks, but that was very hard work!

And the final product:

Have a go yourself - it's addictive!

My first craft fair!

I went to my first craft fair in Aldershot in December (yes I know it was ages ago...) and I thought I'd write about my experience in case anyone else found it useful.

The fair itself was great - in a church with nice people and good stalls. The lady running it put a lot of thought into advertisement and had a santa outside to attract more people into the fair. In addition, the main road in Aldershot was closed and diverted past the church, so that worked in our favour!

For my part, I thought the stall looked pretty good (pics up on facebook here) but sales were slow in getting going. I was sat next to two lovely ladies selling Christmas decorations, but they were doing a roaring trade! My bookmarks finally started selling though, and I was very pleased that my Harry Potter themed bookmarks were the most popular! I set out with what I hoped were two reasonable aims - to make more than it cost me to attend, and to sell at least one of my papercraft pictures.

The first seemed to (eventually!) be going well, but the second less so. People tend not to buy art for others too often and while I cam close two or three times, all the people tempted eventually said that they couldn't justify spending on themselves right before Christmas. However, mid-afternoon I succeeded! I was so pleased to accomplish both the things I set out to.

In addition, I had a nice day with my sister! For my next craft fair I would hope for similar things, but also to sell one of my larger pictures.

I can highly recommend going to craft fairs - especially as a buyer! - to any crafter, but do check what they expect the footfall to be like and the target audience. It may affect whether or not you think it's worth it to go with your product. On that note, I'm going to be making an effort to aim at a more arty crowd in order to sell more pictures. I hope!

Happy Crafting!

xoxo
~Miss 50s