Papercut

My crafting spirits revived while recovering and lying in bed a lot. Yet still too weak to work with clay I nevertheless wanted some exercice for my feeble hands. Some ideas came to my mind and one of it is that I wanted to try a proper papercut for a long time. I've seen many breathtaking pictures of very intricate papercuts on Flickr and elsewhere, but I have to start small and simple of course.

This beautiful picture by Skinny laMinx especially sparked my interest. She also has a neat tutorial on her blog, so I thought I should give it a try. The shapes of my flowers are totally stolen from hers, because I didn't know where to start myself.

My papercut only is the size of a postcard (and was done in bed) but it took more than two hours to complete. My hands got crampy and shaky almost immediately (And I was thinking to myself, why of all things did I have to start with something like this after such exhausting weeks of illness?) but I finished it. All those papercut people must have really strong hands or sharper knives than I have. Probably both. I don't think I'll try this again too soon. I'm quite pleased with my first try though. I neither cut myself nor a wrong line.

I finally framed my papercut and can put it on the wall now. The silvery background is the inner surface of a Tetra Pak and I think this looks just fine.