Wildflower Meadow Papercut #697
This “Wildflower Meadow” papercut is from an ongoing papercutting project that I’ve been doing (where I’m working my way through designs in the “922 Decorative Vector Ornaments” book by Dover Books.)
This week’s design is number 697 in the book. As I’ve mentioned before, the designs are just given numbers in the book and not names, so I’ve had to come up with my own names for them. I had no idea what to call this one. It’s got a sort of central stylised flower which isn’t immediately recognisable to me. I did try to get some clues from the other plants in the design, but they weren’t obvious either. Maybe they’re corn stalks? (Corn as in wheat, not as in sweetcorn. The definition of “corn” depends on whether you use UK/US English.)
So all I could think of was calling it “Wildflower Meadow”. As soon as I thought of that name, I noticed what a funny word “wildflower” is. It’s got four consonants in a row (LDFL). Surely there can’t be many words in English that have four consonants all mashed together? (I’m not counting words with “Y” in them, by the way (e.g. “hymn”, or “gypsy”)) Now I’m trying to think of other examples…
“Hatchback”. “Pitchfork”. Oh – maybe there are more than I thought!
Closer up:
Either I’m getting better at papercutting, or I’m getting better at forgiving myself for the little mistakes that I make – or maybe a bit of both. But for whatever reason, I find this design quite pleasing.
Having said that, I’m not sure I would use it as part of a ‘real life’ composition. All the same, I’m glad to have added it to my sketchbook full of papercuts. I’ve got a growing collection of these ‘samplers’ now, and I’m actually starting to see some improvement and progression overall. Which is a good thing, because that was the whole purpose of this “Cutting all 922 designs from the book” exercise in the first place.
I used to comment here about what I’d been watching or listening to in the background while I made the actual papercut. But because there’s been a big gap between cutting them and documenting them, I’ve forgotten what I was listening to when I cut most of them. Maybe I’ll carry on noting what I’m listening to, but from today instead of the date that I cut the design.
…In which case, today I’ve been listening to the “Writing Excuses” podcast. I deliberately didn’t listen to it for a few months this year, just so I could binge-listen to it later. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing today. Series 14 has had some really useful writing advice in it.
Apart from that, I’ve been giving myself a bit of a day off. I’ve been so busy with paperwork and admin and life for the last few months that I’ve run out of steam. Catching up with my papercutting adventure has been very therapeutic.
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