Recycled & Rescued

I mentioned a while ago that I was contemplating a mini challenge for myself, which I left at that and explained no further. I have been thinking about it for a while now and have decided to go ahead with it!

During my time at University and in my personal work that I sell on Etsy I have accumulated a huge amount of paper too small to create a whole papercut with, that I didn’t want to throw away, but didn’t know what to do with. Now I have left University I don’t have immediate access to paper and papercutting supplies so I thought it would be an interesting challenge if I focused in on this left over paper and I have created a challenge for myself that I have called "Recycled & Rescued” which I will explain below:

• “Recycled & Rescued” will be a range of papercut illustrations within book formats that I will create with all my current stock of paper. I will also create blank notebooks without papercuts that can be used for doodling, sketching, illustrating etc and these will be for sale in my Etsy shop here.
• I will buy no extra paper for this challenge; using only what paper I have available.
• All books and notebooks will be hand cut, hand sewn and will only use my current paper thereby recycling/rescuing existing paper.
• Each books/notebooks contents will vary, having a mix of lined, squared, plain, coloured and textured paper, within them, and some will also include old maps, vintage newspapers and other ephemera I have in stock.
• Each notebook will be a one of a kind, as they will be made solely from my recycled & rescued paper (that would have been thrown away!) and each book will have papercuts throughout based on a certain theme, with the notebooks having a themed papercut cover.
• The themes I am planning on creating papercut books for are;
- Using the silhouettes of my A-Z of Birds I created last summer
- A book of papercut leaves
- A book focused on geometric shapes and patterns

The books will vary in size as I am only using the paper available and once all the paper is used up and all the books have sold, I will no longer carry on this challenge, so if you see a book/notebook you really want, then you should snap it up quickly as they will all be originals and will never be able to be made again!

I will let you know when the first one (or batch of them!) have been made and listed in my etsy shop so you will not miss out on any of the recycled goodness!