It’s Pinterest Challenge time! That time in the month when I join a group of creative bloggers and we all have a good old rummage through out pinterest boards and come up with a pin that we’d like to try out.

This month I’ve been inspired to make some papercut monogrammed art for my cousin’s little one for his 1st birthday by this pin.

To make your own papercut monogram DIY art you will need:

• A picture frame

• Coloured card, one large piece that is thin enough to go through your printer and some bright coloured scraps

• A sheet of nice quality white paper, mine is printer paper but a nice 100gsm quality, not the cheapest of the cheap

• A craft knife - I used my favourite X-acto knife

• A pencil, metal ruler and paper glue

You’ll also need a computer with printer if you want to personalise the art with a name as I have.

The original pin doesn’t have a tutorial to do the papercut so I just used it as inspiration.

First you need to get the letter onto the white paper in reverse. You could print a letter from your computer (don’t forget to mirror it so it’s back to front) in a super chunky font, but because F is a very simple angular letter I just drew my own with a pencil and ruler. If you are drawing your own letter then draw round a small plate or glass to get nice curves.

Mark a narrow border around the inside edge of the letter and then draw double lines all criss crossing the inside of the letter shape to make a load of triangles. Remember that you need to allow a strip of paper between all the triangles so your lines must be in pairs - if you remove too much paper you’ll just have a empty letter!

Cut the triangle shapes out with a craft knife and metal ruler.

Admire your geometric letter but then flip it back over to the wrong side.

Fill in some of the triangle with scraps of coloured card. I just eyeballed the shapes roughly and then trimmed them a tiny sliver at a time until they fitted the gaps. I then glued them in place with the glue stick. You can do as many or as few as you like, or don’t fill in any at all - the choice is yours!

Next take your sheet of plain thin coloured card and print the name towards the bottom of the paper. I just used ‘Word’ on the computer and a font called Modern love.

Glue the papercut letter centrally over the name. It’s worth measuring the name and the width of the letter to get this right. Some letters are deceptive and left or right heavy which can throw things off if you just try to eyeball it. Also go very GENTLY with your glue stick, just dab the thin bits of paper lightly. If you go at it to hard you could rip the paper and then you’ll need to start again!

To trim the art to fit the frame I find the easiest way is to remove the glass from the frame and then lay it over the art centrally. You can play around with it and then when you are happy with the placement just draw around the glass with a pencil and it cut out.

That’s it, just pop the art into the frame and it’s all done. This is for a little boy’s first birthday but it could make a lovely gift for a new baby with their birth date and weight etc or someone of any age in colours to match their bedroom. Art in a larger frame with 2 initials and an & would be nice for a wedding or engagement gift too.

This was a really quick make, the papercutting is so simple and the whole thing probably took me 2 hours maximum from start to finish. I think the most time consuming bit was drawing the monogram on the paper.

I’ll be sharing this idea at these link ups

For more Pinterest inspired projects from this month's Pinterest Challenge hosts, check out the links below ↓