ARTicraft

Lanterns with hand-cut seasonal designs

These lanterns / lamp shades are decorated with paper cuts from mulberry paper. I am cutting them using old traditional polish patterns (Polish folk art – Wycinanki), Japanese Kirigami patterns or my own creations.

I can make customized lamp shades with your choice of patterns (I have over a hundred to show you, or I can create a new ones) or themes (holidays, seasonal, special occasions, animals…etc) and color of paper (from the color palette available).

Electric cord and light bulb is not included. Prices of custom made lanterns / lamp shades varied from $12.00 – $28.00 or more and depends on lamp’s shade size, kind of paper and complexity of cut-outs.

Aggie Ross

Winter Lamp

Guitar Lamp

Dragonfly Lamp

Polish Folk Lamp

Christmas Lamp

Halloween Lamp

The Rustic Mallet

Like the old recipe for chicken soup (first, kill a chicken), I began making my rustic mallet by firstly cutting down a silver maple in my back yard. I cut it down last summer and used my new antique froe to rive sections of the tree’s trunk into pieces resembling lumber. Months later when I got the idea to make the mallet, there was the maple — dried and split and ready to go.

I hadn’t planned to make a “rustic” mallet, but as I was using only hand tools, I wondered how the mallet would be improved by surfacing the outside faces. I couldn’t think of a reason, and I just liked the look of the bark and the split wood.

The Rustic Mallet

Red and gold centerpiece by Aggie Ross

Beginnings…
Aggie Ross learned the tradition of making centerpieces as a young girl in her native Poland, working at her mother’s side.

She made her first topiary in 1990, using mosses and other naturals that were collected from the forest near her family’s summer home north of Warsaw.

Here is a little project that I did recently. It’s marking gauge used for marking cut lines for dove tails and tenons. I made it from poplar. It’s based on the Hamilton marking gauge.

Marking gauge, poplar and steel

The blade is made from an old corner bracket that I had laying around.