Our paper cutting kit
Welcome to Cosy Craft Club's paper cutting month! We really want to encourage you to have a go at paper cutting yourself, and we'll be sharing the key things you need to know to get started. You can find all our paper cutting posts in one place here.
Here at the Cosy Craft Club we send our subscribers a kit with everything they need to try a different craft each month. This month, it's a paper cutting kit!
Our pretty paper cut kit was created by talented paper artist Lucy Dorothy. The kit comes packaged in a stitched vellum packet, with a wool wrap and label telling you what is inside.
Inside are some lovely paper cutting goodies: a self-healing cutting mat, a handle with blade guard, 4 blades, instructions, a practice sheet and 12 templates to cut for yourself! You can see everything being unpacked in this unboxing video.
The instructions tell you how to mount one of the blades in the handle, which was pretty easy to do. Then I got started by working my way through the practice sheet. This was such a useful inclusion in the kit as it tells you what order to cut in, and gives you practice of different types of cuts such as straight, tight curves and long curves. I was glad of the practice sheet because it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be!
After a bit of practice, I started noticing how to control the blade better and what to do if I started going off the line. I was feeling more confident at this point, so I selected a template and started cutting.
Once I got going, I found the paper cutting to be very absorbing and relaxing. You are concentrating quite hard, so you switch off from everything around you. It can be a little frustrating when it doesn’t go quite right, but I think you notice the little errors more when you’re doing it. When you step back and look at the final papercut, it feels quite rewarding!
I really love the look of papercuts that have colour infills (such as those from Apple Seed Paper Cuts), so I thought I’d fit some to the back of my flower. It was harder than I thought it would be! It took longer than I’m willing to admit to decide where to put the colours (especially since I what I ended up with was a fairly simple colour scheme) and then cut all the coloured pieces to the right shape and glue them on. I used pritt stick for this, which was ok but a little stringy. Lucy Dorothy recommends repositionable spray mount for the job, or Sarah from Apple Seed Paper Cuts recommends PVA glue with a tiny spreader.
The final papercut looks lovely and has pride of place on my wall :)
There are so many templates included in this kit that it will definitely keep you going for a while! Now I just have to pick which one to do next…
If you like the look of our paper cutting kit and would like to have a go for yourself (or you know someone who would love to), these kits can be purchased from our Shop.
Rachel x