When I applied for an art show a few months back, I had to pick a category for my art: Fiber Arts or Paper. And I was stumped. I do both. And sometimes both in the same piece. Ultimately I decided that I would go with fiber arts because that’s what I’m “known for” in the local community and if someone was looking for where my booth was, that was probably the category that they would flip to.

I started adding more and more paper to my work about the time of the pandemic. I was trying to find things I could teach people that they could do from their own homes. I was also bored out of my mind and looking for classes I could take from home. Fabric and thread were hard to find. Paper was just much easier to get ahold of, especially recycled paper. It was an obvious choice for me because I’ve been designing fabrics from recycled papers for years, so it was already a part of my practice, just not necessarily the finished product.

I didn’t really set out to become a paper artist. At first, paper was just a practical solution to a practical problem. But once I started working with it, I realized how much of the way I already thought about fabric could be applied to paper—and how many things paper could do that fabric couldn’t.

Fabric and paper really aren’t that different. Both can be folded, layered, stitched, cut, pieced, gathered, curved. One thing I appreciate about paper is its ability to have some structure without having to do layers of interfacing and foam. One of the really fun things about moving more into paper was the chance to discover things. Fabric is familiar enough that I can often look at a piece and have a pretty good idea what it’s going to do before I even touch it. Paper still surprises me. I don’t understand the technical specs of paper at all. Seriously, if anyone knows a class or a book that explains GSM and the different kinds of paper in language that someone-not-a-paper-geek can understand, I need it. I know I have papers I love the feel and weight of but I don’t know how to find that thing again. But I digress.

Paper and fabric also share a lot of the same material components. I have worked with paper made from cotton, silk and wool, just like fabric. Both art forms also have a long history of making something interesting out of scraps. Traditionally quilters didn’t necessarily start with a perfectly coordinated stack of new fabric. Sometimes the interesting part is figuring out how a collection of leftovers and scraps can work together. Paper can work the same way. Surface design techniques like marbling and block printing work great on both surfaces. In fact, one of my favorite moments from a Zoom class where I was a student was pulling out my quilting ruler and rotary cutter to cut some paper for a project. The other students in the class all had book arts background and had never thought of using what they thought of as “quilting tools”. We all laughed about getting so immersed in your own media that you forget to think outside the box.

Several of the classes I have been teaching lately have been all about using recycled paper. I love this for several reasons.

It changes the way you think about starting a project from “what should I buy” to “what do I have?”. It forces you to think about the potential in what’s sitting in front of you instead of curating the perfect color match. The limitations of what you have become part of the problem solving. And for me, this is really the fun part. Sometimes a technique I learned for fabric turns out to work beautifully on paper. Sometimes paper does something I wish fabric would do. And sometimes I make something that sits somewhere in between and makes the whole question of which category it belongs in seem a little silly.

This book is one of the samples from my One Sheet, Six Pockets class. You could use any kind of paper to make the cover for this book, but for my samples, I used the ubiquitous brown paper shopping bag. It’s cheap and easy; everyone has one. It’s actually a nice weight and thickness for this project and makes a book that feels sturdy. This tomatoes design was made from catalog photos of tablecloths and clothing, a scrap of glitter card stock, green masking tape and a little stitching in green thread. The diagonal line you see across the front is one of the six pockets that you fold into the cover. Inside is filled with scrap paper to make the pages: copier paper, graph paper, misprinted pattern pages.

The project in the Envelope Book class is another folded structure but without the pages. It’s maybe more for organizing a collection of objects like photos. It’s also made with just two sheets of paper. Something like wrapping paper would be great for this one and I know I have a couple of pieces folded up that were too nice to just toss.

These are both very simple structures, but that’s part of what I like about them. You don’t need a studio full of specialized bookbinding equipment to start making things with paper. You can start with the paper you already have and try something without worrying that you are using up the “good stuff”.