I made this video in an afternoon with one of my paper puppets, just for fun. Happy Easter!

As we near the end of the year and the decade, we collectively glance back at the recent past and make an assessment. Good and bad, pros and cons. We live in strange and uncertain times, indeed, but we’re not the first — nor will we be the last — to think this. There is always beauty in bleakness, and when we seem to be halted by an impasse, creativity shows us a new path around the blockage. I don’t ordinarily wax poetic like this, dear Internet, but it’s just been that sort of year for me, filled with triumphs and sadness, beginnings and endings. This year, I lost my mother. At almost 90 years old, she led a full life and died in her own place surrounded by family which, when you consider it, is the best that any of us could hope for. I am saddened by this, but this sadness doesn’t paralyze me. On the contrary, it propels me forward. It underscores the brevity of our short lives, and the urgency to leave nothing undone. Things will definitely be left undone, of course, but that doesn’t stop us trying. I’m under no such delusion that my creative output as an artist will last much past my lifetime, but it’s never really been about the end product. It’s always been about the joy of making.

January 2020 will mark exactly one year since I launched my Etsy shop Papercut Puppets. Well, um, technically it was a re-launch of my shop.

The backstory: my Etsy shop proudly displays the text since 2010, and this is certainly the case. I did create a shop on Etsy way back in 2010, shortly after graduating with my MFA in Visual Arts. I made a short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to sell my original art and lithographic prints online and abandoned the shop a few months after its initial launch. It lay dormant for over eight years, until early this year when I decided to give it another try. This time, I decided to go cheap and crafty with articulated paper puppets and paper dolls. A rather niche product, admittedly, but one which I felt I’d enjoy creating.

Now, if you regularly follow my blog, you’ll know already that my paper puppets are not your run-of-the-mill, rosy-cheeked cutesy toddlers, puppies, or kittens. In short, these aren’t your Grandma’s paper crafts. My Strange Girls series of paper puppets, for instance, includes a pair of conjoined twins, a doll with a parasitic twin named Myrtle (a reference to the 19th-century sideshow performer Myrtle Corbin), and a girl with a condition called hypertrichosis which causes excessive hair growth on portions of the body. Other puppets include butterflies, two octopuses, a mermaid, and toddlers with bird heads. All puppets and dolls have a vintage look, inspired by illustrations from the 19th century (though all are original drawings by me).

My custom, hand-made paper puppets and dolls celebrate the odd and beautifully unusual. Prices range from $6 for DIY downloadable paper crafts, up to $25-50 for pre-assembled puppets (Canadian dollars, eh).

https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/PapercutPuppets