Paper Stacking

For this project I chose to push myself, and so I chose a rather oblong pumpkin to work with. I had no idea the task I got myself into! For starters, because of the shape of the pumpkin I didn't want to shape the layers of paper as I stacked. Instead, I simply traced the pumpkin at its widest point and made all of the layers that shape.

Many hours, one and a half bottles of Elmer's wood glue, and five sheets of that $8 paper later, I was finished gluing and stacking. Knowing it was sand-able I was using the glue to my advantage, using as much of it as I could on each layer without it bubbling over the size when I put down the next layer of paper.I let it dry overnight, and the next morning I noticed that part of the uppermost layers had "warped" and curved, but I decided not to allow that to be a hindrance.. Instead, I used it to my advantage! I borrowed a power sander from my handy-dandy boyfriend, and started sanding.

(Sidenote: Be careful with these sanders! I have shed more blood for this class than any other -- extra credit? ;] )

Sanding was extremely difficult because of the sheer amount of it that had to be done. I was two hours in before any kind of actual shape began to form. I had to work with the warping of the paper, which became more of a hindrance than anything because it took more to sand those layers than the others, but finally it began to take shape... And many hours later, voila! Masterpiece!

I am incredibly proud of my pumpkin. Sure, maybe it doesn't look as close to my oblong-y pumpkin as I would like, but that's okay!

For my abstract fruit I decided to look back on my roots -- German roots, that is! I wished to play homage to the German architecture and a lot of the contrasting lines involved, and so chose a highly geometric style including lots of straight edges. The piece looks highly castle-esque. I sanded the edges to round them a bit to bring it closer to being a "fruit", and instead of creating a stem that wound its way up and out of the piece, I drilled a hole into it. Why? It started by accident, but then I decided I liked it -- because it was supposed to be abstract, why couldn't it have an inverted stem? Then to play on narrative, I decided that this fruit would come from a thin vine -- and the actual fruit itself would slide off of the vine, instead of needing to be cut. Why not!