Scherenschnitte Get-Together

Several members of the Take Joy Society gathered at Cindy's quaint stone house this month to make Valentines.  She shared the house's history with us:

The farm I live on is called Montpelier and the land first belonged to Evan Shelby whose son  became the first governor of Kentucky. He had a wooden home and we do not know where it was located. Then it was purchased by John Thompson Mason and his wife Elizabeth. They built the houses that are here today and are buried in a small graveyard on the hill behind my house.  The  house I live in was the slave master’s house and it was built in the 1750’s. The next owners of Montpelier were the Barnes family and upon their death they freed all the slaves. The next, and last owners, are the Seiberts. My children are the 7^th generation of the Seibert family to live on the farm.

Cindy comes from a long line of watercolor artists.  Here is her watercolor of what the house looked like before they added on to it more than 30 years ago. . . .

She has other artistic talents as well, like these welded sculptures. . . .

Before we began our craft we had a delicious Apricot Cake and Dollie's Tea Room's special blend tea. . . .

Scherenschnitte means "scissors cutting" and was introduced to Europe in the 16th century.  Cindy wrote it out phonetically for us and showed us samples she'd prepared. . . .

She gave us patterns to trace, but you can draw anything you'd like. . . .

Then she showed us how to place the pattern in the fold of a piece of paper and trace the design on the light board (or you can use the light from outside by placing it on a windowpane).  You want it in the fold because you will be cutting one design through two pieces of paper that you'll unfold when you're done.  This way both sides of the design will be identical.  Then she used an exacto knife--or you could use the special small, sharp-pointed scissors made for papercutting, to cut out the requisite spaces.  Finally, she used scissors to cut around the outer outline of the design. . . .

Here we are cutting out our designs. . . .

Some of us chose to color ours.  If you're brave enough (i.e., confident in your handwriting skills) you can write words along the outside like Cindy did in the samples.  The bottom right piece is the one Cindy worked on while we did ours.  It is not quite finished, but you can see how intricate you can make them if you have the patience to cut out all those little spaces. . . .

Here is a short video that goes through the steps (this is not our Cindy ☺︎). . . .

                               


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Take Joy!