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Thursday, January 21, 2016

Red Paper Cutting Craft for Year of the Monkey

Every year, I will try to do some Chinese New Year craft to decorate our home. Not only it brings out the festive cheer, it is also more economical and I have greater satisfaction looking at the crafts that I made for the family.

As the Year of the Monkey approaches, I decided to challenge myself and do something different apart from the Red Packet ornaments which I have made the previous year. This time, I tried to do paper cutting. It was an impromptu idea and I do not have the proper cutting equipment. I googled on the internet for a simple Monkey cut-out design and print it out as a template. Stapler the template on a piece of red coloured paper, and I used a pen-knife to cut out the design.

It was a delicate and challenging task as my pen-knife was too big to carve out the smaller parts. I took 20 minutes for my first Monkey paper cut-out. Looked a little rough on the edges but still presentable from afar.
 

With the experience I gathered from my first attempt, I was able to control the pen knife better and decided to go for a tougher design. I picked a design of a monkey holding a peach and stepping on a golden ingot. There are more details within and it took me 45 minutes to complete the cutting.


The twin monkeys paper cut out look pretty nice on the white wall and I can't wait to put them up! 

I googled further on more paper cut-outs and chanced upon a video teaching how to cut symmetrical patterns. (Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHepfO73ye4). Based on the concept of symmetry and with reference to other cut out design on the websites, I drew my pattern on the red folded paper and successfully cut out a Monkey design! The entire process is not easy but the satisfaction is tremendous.


If you like to make some CNY ornaments to brighten your home, you may wish to give paper cut out a try!


1 comment:

Unknown said...

hello. can u teach me how to creat these monkey paper cut?

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