Oh snap, it's scherenschnitte

(I know, I know, I really need to get better at naming my blog posts. Have mercy.)

A family friend introduced the idea of scherenschnitte to my mom, and now I'm in love with these lacy, delicate patterns. We've had a scherenschnitte-style ornament hanging from our Christmas tree for years, and the design always led me to believe they were Scandanavian in origin, but according to our friend and Wikipedia, it's German.

In any case, I thought they would make a brilliant (and cheap) present for my boyfriend's parents, so I worked some Google magic and found templates from an old magazine on a blog, identical to the patterns our friend has used. I redrew some to fit them onto a 4.4 by 5.8 inch card.

To start, I folded a piece of computer paper in half. Schereschnitte designs are half the full pattern — each side is the mirror image of the other — so I aligned the crease with the edge of the pattern and traced it. I have a clear clipboard that I could hold up to the light to make tracing easier, but you can kick it old school and use carbon copying or a window. I cut out the patterns using embroidery scissors and used an Xacto knife for the tiny details.

I put a dark red background on the cards using construction paper, then glued the designs to the background. I used a Q-tip to very, very carefully apply glue to the back of the design, then pressed it down — the design is so delicate I was afraid it would rip. Here's how they turned out:

I'm incredibly pleased with myself. So incredibly pleased with myself, in fact, that I went ahead and made 3D versions for ornaments. I started out the same way I did with the cards, tracing the pattern then cutting it out. I did this twice, then, with a very thin line of glue, glued the two together along the crease with a loop of thread.

I could've done a better job cutting out the little fiddly garland bits, but it turned out fairly well:

If you want to be fancy too, check out the link up above, or you can use the Christmas tree template I drew up for the ornament.

I'm pretty in love with the whole idea of scherenschnitte, so I'll probably try and design more. In the meantime, I'll be getting inspiration from this beautiful papercutting blog and this design I found in the Googles, a great design to riff on.