Arnold Grummer's Design Team Blog

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 involv...

It is always a challenge to come up with something a bit different for the posts I do for the  Arnold Grummer Papermaking blog .  It seems that I have this "habit" of never wanting to just make a single sheet of paper or make a single paper casting square.  To me it's always about experimenting or trying something new or at least a new twist on an existing technique. There are a few different books on "paper making" in my craft library, but the books I refer to the most are " The Complete Guide to Easy Papermaking" , " Arnold Grummer's  Complete Guide to Paper Casting"  and  "trash-to-treasure paper making" , also by Arnold Grummer.                                             It was in "trash-to-treasure papermaking" where I found the idea for "Surface Embedment" and the term "Napkinization", so I decided to give this a try.  This is a p...