Quick play: woven paper lanterns

Helen Hiebert is a papercraft artist, and one of the things she is very good at is paper weaving. She even runs a “Weave through Winter” course which looks fascinating, but wasn’t right for me this year. Back in December, though, she did a free Winter Solstice Lantern Zoom Workshop (now on YouTube) which I had a go at.

The smaller, pink, lantern was my proof of concept, made from a page pulled from a notepad and a painted book page from my stash. The other was made from lightweight card and a couple of scrap papers covered in coloured wax from my encaustic experiments.

I’ve done little bits of paper weaving before, but just with straight strips of card, so I was curious how the curved lines would work. The answer is, of course, basically just the same as with straight pieces except the last strip is more fiddly to get in place if you don’t have open edges. Cutting the windows was new to me though and does add an extra dimension to the effect. I now find myself staring at some of the paper weavings on Helen’s Instagram trying to figure out how they’re put together.

This was an interesting technique that will doubtless surface in a future mixed media piece, but I shan’t be making any more lanterns — they are neither beautiful nor practical enough to take up space in my home, but they were fun to make.