Scherenschitte Bugs of Summer

If my favored artistic medium is wool, my mother's is paper.  Occasionally we like to dabble in each others' preferred mediums.  This past week I have been doing just that.  I am far from great at scherenschitte or paper cutting, but from time to time I do enjoy it.

Scherenschitte reminds me of my college years.  My mother took a class in it and for the entire time I was in college, care packages came with a beautiful piece of cut paper glued to a card or even to a container of goodies.  It was beautiful, but I'm not sure at the time I appreciated just how much work and love she put into these pieces of art she sent.

I've done bits and pieces of this art form over the past few years.  In the foreground of this Easter picture, you can see the Palm Sunday/Easter rooster I cut out last year.

I also used a similar technique to cut out silhouettes of W that I gave as Mother's Day gifts to grandmothers last year.  Somehow, I don't have any pictures or scans of those, but they made a wonderful gift.

Recently, I decided I wanted to do some more paper cutting and sketched and cut out these design patters from white paper.  I scanned these bugs over a sheet of colored paper and scanned them.  I took the image this created and digitally edited it to come up with this banner for the blog.

I think this would make beautiful note cards if I ever decide to get them printed.

Today, I played with these designs some more, re-sketching some all together and created and scanned this template which I scanned and printed out on red, blue, yellow and green card stock.

I then mounted them on small squares of black card stock, scanned them and edited the images together.

I think these would be really nice in some sort of simple wood frames and  placed on a summer nature table.  I'm looking forward to designing some more of these cut paper pieces.