Waiting for Books

Today I was waiting for the UPS driver to bring the wonderful paper cutting books that I ordered.  Last year I was very naughty and swapped a lot of books through www.paperbackswap.com , the idea was to find good homes for my crafting books.  Unfortunately I asked for more books then I traded away!  So now I have more than 20 books more then traded.  Still it could be worse, though I now have over 100 books on embroidery and lace making alone.

The book "Creative Paper Cutting, Fifteen Paper Sculptures to Inspire and Delight" is a lovely book.  The projects are quite different from the Scherenschnitte paper cutting.  Instead
Creative Paper Cutting" gives a variety of sculpted paper projects. Having read the book using the Amazon "Look Inside" feature, I immediately went to the projects.  But instead of starting on the first and easiest project I jumped to project 10.  The 10th project is a sculpture of a beetle and very detailed.  Instead of laying the pattern on cardboard and cutting the pieces out I just printed the images directly by copying onto the card stock.  This didn't work because the card stock was to soft to emboss and it was hard to cut all the printed lines so that they didn't show.  The project also called for white tissue paper which I do not have.  It was a sad looking beetle especially since I lost one of it's wings!  Not a very promising start!  Next time I will take advice from the book on cutting and embossing.

The last few days all the projects I have tried have not come out well.  This last weekend I worked on learning the flat 10 strand Kumihimo braid worked on the square foam board.  The practice strand out well only a few wobbles.  Then I cut 10 pieces of size 10 crochet cotton and strung each thread with 50 size 8 seed beads.  The strand started well but when I started adding the beads it failed.  From what I can see the project needed a thicker thread or smaller beads.  The project just couldn't keep the beads in place.  Also the glass beads wore the cotton thread badly.  Lesson learned!  Still I hope to make a necklace using the Kumihimo technique.  Tomorrow I hope to make the hummingbird project, it was this project that inspired me to buy the book.