Tag Archives: cut paper

Welcome Quack

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It’s that time once again!

You might be thinking it’s too soon! It can’t possibly be that time. But here in Tucson, school starts in August. To be completely accurate, it begins tomorrow, August 1.

I didn’t have any inspiration when I walked in the building, but I noticed that someone had chucked a perfectly good bit of fancy paper in the recycling bin. I am forever pulling things out of recycling, sometimes because they are not recyclable, and sometimes because they are reusable by me.

So I got started with the background and the lettering and this pretty foiled paper was just winking at me. Water…ducks…rain…pun. Voila! Plus we’re still inside the monsoon.

Took about 5½ hours total but I stopped for a lot of conversation. Also the air conditioning has been broken since last May and it was 84° in there, which slows you down. I had a lot of conversations about that.

5 Silver Paper Feathers

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I’m very satisfied with this project, which took about 90 minutes. (It’s not quite done; the feathers aren’t attached to the hat yet.)

The Coyote and I are going to a goth masquerade ball and I have a very cool outfit put together but it seemed like I should add a top hat to match him and to enby it up. So he ordered me one, but it turned out to be a large, when my head is extra small. And it took forever to come and when it got here I was not impressed with the little feather that came with it.

Obviously it needed a big silver feather! Obviously there were some good ones on Etsy but none that could be delivered before the ball, which was annoying until it hit me that I could easily make paper feathers with materials already in my workshop. Just 3 kinds of sparkly metallic specialty paper and matte medium.

To be extra fancy I sharpened the scissors on a whetstone before beginning.

So here it is. And I will be the most magical dragon at the ball. Although I still have to figure out how to attach my mask to my glasses. Because I went to this masquerade last year in a different mask and I couldn’t see a thing all night. The new one is lace and can probably be tied on.

A Sweet Little Elephant

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I recently visited my mother-in-law in her new home and I noticed she had a bunch of elephant pictures on the wall and I was like, “I didn’t know you liked elephants.” (I mean seriously, I have known her for 15+ years; I had no idea she loved elephants. I feel unobservant.)

Like all humans from the great state of Kansas, she also likes sunflowers. I’m pretty sure they don’t even let you rent an apartment in Kansas if you don’t like sunflowers.

Anyway, I had to send her an elephant. The background is watercolor. The elephant is specialty paper. I made the sunflower by cutting petal shapes out of a picture of some other yellow flowers in a magazine.

He was shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy

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And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.

Just a small commission to recreate the Lorax, a cryptid who was truly ahead of his time, so far ahead of his time that it was 35 years between the publication of the original source material and the film version (retitled An Inconvenient Truth) starring former future United States President Al Gore as the Lorax. And that film was also ahead of its time, and no one wanted hear the Lorax’s message then either, and now the world is on fire. And I don’t even have a truffula seed.

Tra-la-la. We knew what we were doing 100 years ago and we could see the effects 20 years ago when we still had a chance to fix it and now it’s too late. Tra-la-la.

Feeling Good

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Originally, I planned to create this bulletin board in January, as a tribute to the new year. I also planned for it to not be cold and cloudy all year. I also planned to make the letters very fancy and musical. As they say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans. We haven’t got much sun, but I did my best to summon it.

I didn’t put an attribution on this quote. I knew that neither Muse nor Michael Buble was the original author. For a while I thought it was Nina Simone, but it turns out that some people I never heard of wrote it in 1964, the year before Ms. Simone made her recording, and frankly their names (Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse) were long and I wanted to go home.

The whole thing is kind of slapdash but I’ve learned that if I try to make things perfect, I fail, but it I start out making things wabi-sabi, the finished product LOOKS perfect.

A Little Spark Bulletin Board

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Well I messed up the line spacing but otherwise this is fun and different.

Letters are hand cut based on the Holiday font. I think I might have actually used this one before. Simple shapes, easy to work with. The big spark is also hand cut, and the rest are drawn with metallic markers.

Always trying to find some light in the darkness.

Another Giant Sugar Skull

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I sort of want to keep working on this but it’s Friday and I like to leave school by 5….

This isn’t my first calavera bulletin board but this one is way better than the first one and after 12 years I guess it’s OK to repeat myself a little. But I really wish I could cover the whole thing with roses. And more dots and hearts on the skull. But sometimes you have to just say when.

Behold! The Biblioburro

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There is a long and glorious history of mobile libraries powered by sure-footed donkeys, delivering books to people in remote or undeveloped areas where readers have no other access to texts, so when the librarian asked me to decorate the cart she intended to use to bring books to classrooms on days when the library is inaccessible to students, I knew I wanted to make this donkey-drawn bookmobile to pay homage to the most literate members of the asinine species.

Total run time was probably just over 2 hours. The school counselor helped me laminate it so it should last for a while.

Back to School 108° Edition

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It’s a bit pared down but my hands are still in recovery mode from the feigned glass windows (ultimately a ~30-hour job) and also it was 108° outside, the breezeway, where this bulletin board hangs. I use metallic paint pens rather than staples, because it’s easier and that cork is getting destroyed.

it’s the back of a lion. The Lineweaver Lions go back to school Thursday, and I drew a lion’s back. That is the whole gimmick.

i also knocked together another simple design so there wouldn’t be an empty bulletin board right at the beginning of the tour on parents’ night, which I’ll put in a separate post.