Rebecca Gieseking

One more piece in my lacy series. The lace on this one is a return to the angular shapes of my earlier pieces, but with even more cutouts. As I’ve gotten into the series, I’ve gotten comfortable cutting away more and more of the paper and learned that I can go a lot farther than I expected without the piece collapsing on itself. In this piece, I laid out the lace by drawing straight lines and cut out all the gaps between them. That leaves a lot of gaps where you can see through both layers of lace and all the way through the model. Like most of my recent pieces in the series, this one is painted on the inside, but the color isn’t nearly as visible with so many cutouts.

This piece is a continuation of my series of vases with lacy cutouts. I started playing recently with using curved cutout shapes to form the lacy pattern, and this piece uses a similar type of cutouts. Before we get to the vase, here’s the mostly-finished lace pattern on the pre-creased paper:

The new element in this vase is that the lace flare at the top edge flows over the top edge and curves back down. Since the cut paper is so delicate, it was tricky to get that section to flip over correctly without ripping or folding over.

This piece is my latest exploration of incorporating lace-like cutouts into my vases. The triangle lace pattern is similar the one I’ve used in several of my earlier pieces. I’m continuing the theme of having a brighter color inside the vase that shows through the cutouts.

One of the interesting things in this one is how well the cutouts in the front and back line up at certain angles, making it possible to see all the way through. That creates a neat effect that I wasn’t expecting to be so prominent in this form.

I’ve been working recently on a series of vases where I’ve been exploring cutting lace-like shapes into the vase. This piece is the latest in that series, moving away from only angular shapes of the cutouts. The cutout shapes spiral back and forth around the vase form and emerge as a flare from the top edge.

Similar to one of the other vases, I painted only the inside of the paper. The cutout sections of the paper reveal pops of the brighter color inside. I played a bit with cutting the curves using templates but ended up cutting most of the curves freehand. I was surprised how smoothly that went – and I’m still very surprised that I haven’t run into any major issues in any of these vases with cutting too far and destroying the paper!

I’ve been playing with variations on the diagonal shift quite a bit recently, including folding a shift from a cone instead of a cylinder (and from an inverted cone). This model is the first time I’ve incorporated that into a vase. Continuing with the theme from several of my recent vases, the painted lines are deliberately aligned to look like curved shapes on the finished model, instead of flat planes. I’m hoping to keep exploring in this direction and turn this into a series.

This summer, I folded a vase from a piece of paper with a lacy cut edge. This piece is a continuation of that theme. The lace pattern here is fairly similar, but it’s based on placing the cut triangles instead of placing the solid lines to cut around. The other big change is that I painted the inside of the paper. I like how that makes the cutouts visible even on the neck of the vase where you can only see through to the pleated layer just underneath the cutout. I’m really happy with how the photographs show the cutouts in the vase’s shadow too.