stencilled paper (Q1281)

Paper decorated by cutting a design out of a thin yet durable piece of sheet material, such as thin paper board, paper or parchment, and dabbing, pouncing, sprinkling, or rubbing a colour through the openings (cut-out stencil). Stencilling can be repeated numerous times, with the same or different colours and in conjunction with other decoration techniques like block-printing or metal-leaf embossing. Another type of stencilling only occasionally encountered on paper involved scattering small pieces of material such as grains of rice or small chips of stone over a piece of paper, usually already coloured, and sprinkling over them to create the decoration (random stencil). This technique was much more often used for the decoration of bookblock edges.