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Image features: Large wrapping cloth made from sheets of paper from account ledgers, glued together and stained with persimmon, giving a brownish color except where later patched with lighter colored papers. Writing still evident on sheets. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object
Only Seeing 
September is New York Textile Month, a citywide celebration of textile creativity. As in past years, the museum is collaborating with the Textile Society of America. A non-profit professional organization of scholars, educators, and artists in the field of textiles, TSA provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of information about textiles worldwide....
A dark brown paper stencil with a cut-away pattern of triangles joined in lines of two or three.
Martial Iris
In the traditional Japanese craft of katagami, paper stencils are carved by master artisans for use in decorating textiles. Documented since at least the sixteenth century, the technique developed out of methods originally devised for embellishing leather armor. Some common katagami motifs record this history: the stylized iris pattern that appears on this stencil symbolizes bravery....
Image features a cut and folded white paper sphere that sits upright upon the center fold of a piece of paper. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Kirigami Intricacies: More than Folding Paper
In celebration of The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, this Object of the Day post takes a multisensory approach to an object in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. This cut and folded paper sphere created by Masahiro Chatani in 1980 is a complex example of “origamic architecture,” a type of kirigami (切り紙)—from the words kiru (to cut)...
Paper Wave
The original idea behind the Finnish design firm, Woodnotes, was to combine artistic creativity with inspiration from two basic Finnish materials: wood and paper. All of the products by Woodnotes utilize paper yarn that is spun from durable kraft paper. The amount of paper used in the textile varies between 70–100%, with cotton as the...
Reclaiming Paper and Textiles
A wall paper made of recycled newspaper and nylon.
From Paper to Porcelain
For the Paper Porcelain tableware series, designers Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings sought to translate paper models—an integral part of their design process—into porcelain. First, they sketched the forms, geometry, and color of the cups and saucers. The two-page concept drawing below, in Cooper Hewitt’s collection, was cut from the designers’ Moleskine sketchbook and dates...
Design Dictionary: Papermaking
See how paper is made by hand in this short video. Paper maker and educator Amy Jacobs demonstrates the basics of this technique at Dieu Donné papermill in Manhattan. This paper making project took about 3 hours of active work, plus about 48 hours of air-drying. About this series: Design Dictionary is a new Cooper...
The Shredded Series
  The Shredded Collection Table (Fast Company Edition), made from 26 kilograms of Fast Company magazine. The Shredded Collection Console (White Edition), made from 5 kilograms of shredded confidential documents. Belgian industrial designer Jens Praet’s Shredded Series upcycles old magazines and paper into handcrafted furniture. According to Praet, “what started out as a research project...
Design Miami
  First stop: Moorhead & Moorhead’s Design Miami/ tent exterior. The Cooper-Hewitt group was greeted by brothers, Robert (industrial designer) and Granger (architect), to talk about the dynamic canopied entrance to the design show – a bris soleil of hand cut, twisted vinyl strips that perform a dance of shadows on the ground. Taking a...