anika mari

I drew this pattern in illustrator from a sketch I did. I printed it out (I tiled it because it was bigger than 8.5×11) then taped the print out onto a nice piece of paper with double sided tape.

The double sided tape said that it was “removable” but, it still ended up tearing up the surface of the paper. Next time I’ll make the tape less sticky by sticking it down on my skin, like the inside of my arm (I’m sure it sounds weird, but it works to make any tape less tacky, but still sticky enough to stick to most surfaces) and pulling it back up before sticking it to the good paper. Also, I’ll tape it a little further away from the edge of the image area, so that I could just crop it out if need be.

Once the printout was taped to the good paper, it was just a lot of patience and an xacto knife, cutting around the edges of each part of the pattern.

I changed blades halfway through and a new blade made all the difference (I think the one I started with was already a bit dull); I would start with a new blade at the beginning when I do it again.

Probably not practical if you wanted a lot of multiples of the same thing, but if you need a lot of them, you can do really detailed cutouts with laser cutting–it’s weird because it kind of burns the back of the piece of paper, but the detail far exceeds what you can do with die-cutting.