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Bargello
Welcome to our bargello page to accompany our wall hanging kit from Oh Sew Bootiful! You'll find our video demonstration, tips and inspriation. Enjoy!
PLEASE NOTE: This page is a work in progress! I will finish it next week :)
What is papercutting?
Papercutting is the craft of cutting away areas of a sheet of paper to leave an artwork, usually in one piece. Papercutting can be done with a pair of scissors, but for more detailed work a craft knife is usually used.
Papercutting often uses a design printed onto the paper, where the gray areas are cut away, leaving the white areas of the finished design. The design can be mounted onto a coloured piece of paper to show off the cutouts, or different pieces of coloured paper can be placed behind the cutouts to create a colourful picture. Some artists also paint the papercut piece to add further interest.
My experience with this kit
Our papercutting lanterns kit makes 3 cylindrical lanterns, each cut from a flat piece of paper and glued to a piece of vellum paper. This is then curled into a cylinder and secured with glue or paperclips (paperclips means you can store them flat when not in use) - pop a tea light inside and you're ready to go!
I do have a fair amount of papercutting experience - it was one of our first ever Cosy Craft Club boxes, and I fell in love with it so I've done it a few times over the years! I found these designs to be fairly simple but with a small amount of challenge, which I hope you enjoy. I think the hardest one was actually the houses design (pictured) as there are lots of thin elements that you have to try not to cut through! A slow and steady hand will do the job though, and if you do accidentally cut through one area, you can glue it well to the vellum and hopefully it won't be too obvious.
One point to note is that with this kit there is a difference to most papercutting templates: usually you are cutting on the reverse side, so you can turn it over at the end and you can't tell where you have deviated from the template. Unfortunately with this kit, the template has detailed printed on that you want to keep (such as the wreaths on the doors) so you will need to be careful to cut away all traces of the grey template.
My top papercutting tips
Here are my top tips for you to keep in mind when papercutting! These are things that I've learned from experience, so I hope they are useful to you.
1. Before you start on your templates, practice cutting shapes on another piece of paper first. Draw some rectangles of different sizes and shapes, some big and small curves, and some big and small circles. It's a great way of warming up, and of practising how to cut different shapes.
2. When starting on your design, cut away the smallest areas first and gradually work your way up to the biggest areas. This will help the paper to stay stable for as long as possible.
3. Think about which areas you are cutting away and which you want to keep. You can extend cuts into the areas you will cut away but you want to be careful about not cutting into the white areas that you want to keep.
4. Turn the paper as you go round so that you're always cutting at a comfortable angle. Big curves are easiest to do in sections, so cut the first part of the curve, turn the paper and then cut the next part.
5. When doing long cuts, pay attention to the angle of the blade. You want to make sure that it is pointing in the direction you want to go in, or else your cuts will start wandering away from the desired line. If you find this is happening, just gradually bring it back to the right direction.
6. Don't press too hard (you'll just make your hand ache!). You just need to press hard enough to go through the paper.
7. If your blade is starting to feel like hard work, put a new one in! You might want to use a fresh blade for each of the 3 templates.
8. If you have a bit of paper in a corner that hasn't cut away, just press your knife into the corner on each side (taking care not to cut into the paper you want to keep), and that should cut away the paper.
9. As you cut more paper away, your piece will become more unstable. Use your non-cutting hand to carefully hold the paper still - you'll need to hold it quite close to where you are cutting so be careful not to cut yourself. You really don't want your paper to rip!
10. Go slowly, and enjoy the process!
Video tutorial coming soon!
Paper cutting inspiration
I'm a big fan of lino printing and I follow a range of lovely lino printers on Instagram. Here are a few of them, I hope they inspire your future lino printing!
Emillie's beautiful nature inspired embroideries really showcase thread painting's ability to recreate the natural environment in a beautiful way. If you love Emillie's designs, you can purchase patterns or buy her books in her Etsy shop.
Michelle's work mostly centres around animals, and particularly pets. The way she captures fur and textures is incredible! She has also written a couple of books on animal portrait embroidery, plus she has an online course if you want to go deeper.
Sila creates beautiful portraits, mainly of women from the back - meaning that she can really focus on the clothes and hair! Her work has so much emotion built in, and the little details work to create lifelike images that really resonate. She also has a course, if you'd like to learn how to embroider people too!
Lucy's work often centres around glass vessels with liquid in, and the results are so incredibly realistic that you almost feel like you can pick them up! She is so clever with how she creates the shading to mimic light shining through the glass and the level of detail is astonishing.
I've also created a Pinterest board of tutorials, tips and inspiration! Click the picture below to see what I've pinned for you :)
