Kirigami with Handmade Paper

Making kirigami with handmade paper is easy and the results can be elegant or quirky depending on your choices. Whether you are using your handmade paper to make into kirigami or adding kirigami pieces into your handmade paper, the results are beautiful.

"So what is kirigami?" you may ask.

Kirigami is the combination of folding and cutting paper to make designs. Most of us have made paper snowflakes. That is a form of kirigami. First, you fold the paper and then you cut elements from the folds. Unfolding the piece reveals the pattern.

There are two parts to this article:
Part One - Making kirigami
Part Two - Incorporating kirigami in your handmade paper.

Materials:

recycled materials to make paper
Arnold Grummer's medium hand mold
basin for water
Couch sheets
blender
scissors with thin, sharp blades

Video tutorials to watch:

How to Make Paper: Surface Embedment
How to Make Paper: Sheet Layering

Instructions:

Making Kirigami:

Kirigami involves folding and cutting. To have the best results, use a thin piece of paper. This will make cutting easier. A thicker sheet will be challenging to cut precisely.

Pull out scraps of your handmade paper from other projects to begin. Once you feel ready you can fill a larger sheet with your kirigami.

Here is a two-inch circle of paper left over from another project.

Fold in half and then in thirds.

Cut shapes into the folded areas.

Open and you have a figure which looks like this.

Using a rectangular piece of paper, fold once horizontally and again verically.

Cut along the edges and folds.

Unfold and get a shape something like this.

With a rectangular paper - fold the paper into a fan shape.

Cut along the edges and the fold.

Unfold to get a repeating shape something like this.

Keep experimenting with adding more slices and find your kirigami style emerge.

Kirigami can be hung in windows, added to mixed media projects, and used as paper doilies. Here you can see how I used a kirigami piece as a mask in this monoprint.

Next we will discuss incorporating kirigami into your handmade paper.

Incorporating Kirigami in Your Handmade Paper

You have made this beautiful handmade paper, folded and cut it into a beautiful pattern. Now you want to embed it in a new sheet of paper. Great! Be aware, however, that you can't just add it and swish like other additives. I tried. The beautiful figure you have cut out of your own handmade paper will scrunch up just before it dissolves into lumps in the pulp. So here are some tips for getting it to work.

This beauty is no more. As you can see, I put it in first thinking it would be important for it to be wet for everything to adhere.  The pulp was poured on after. It dissolved. Back into the mixer it went. 

For this one, the pulp was poured first, agitated and the kirigami added just before pulling it up from the water. Here it is on a couch sheet. The kirigami was thin, the paper was thin, so I decided it really needed another layer on the backside. So another sheet of paper using the same materials was prepared, pressed and placed on a couch sheet. They were then carefully matched and couched together. Arnold Grummer has an excellent video showing this technique - How to Make Paper: Sheet Layering.

On the couch sheet below, it looks like felt. 

In this photo you can see the edge where I didn't line it up perfectly. I like it so I kept it, but it could just as easily be trimmed. 

This was a smaller piece of kirigami, but it looks sweet against the yellow and white speckled paper. 

This paper really needed that second sheet, as you can see. The top layer, with the kirigami embedded, didn't get an even cover. Having run out of the exact color used previously, a layer of straight up pink was made and applied. I like those variations. If you didn't, there is always trimming or putting it back into the blender and starting over. 

These pieces can be framed or used in making books and other crafts. 

I hope you will enjoy making kirigami with your handmade paper, try embedding it in more handmade paper and surprise yourself with how many variations you can achieve. 

Want to learn more about Japanese paper crafts? I'm doing a series of blogposts on just that subject. I'd love to have you come for a visit at lyndashoup.com/blog/

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