Southeast Missouri State University student publication

Anne Spaller-Brown hosts Paper Pumpkin Crafting Class

Monday, September 30, 2019
Anne Spaller-Brown explaining catalog construction designs to the class.
Photo by Jelani Days

Codefi, a coworking space in Downtown Cape Girardeau raked in the fall season on Thursday Sep.19 with a ‘Paper Pumpkin’ kit class hosted by Anne Spaller-Brown.

This month’s kit included a haunted house and multiple small Halloween candy boxes. The crafts are built entirely by hand using pieces of colored paper, stencils for stamps, and cutouts of plastic images like gravestones and skeletons.

Throughout the event, Spaller-Brown showed the attendants different ways to create designs by stamping, folding, and gluing pieces of paper onto the structures.

Spaller-Brown, originally from Germany, moved to Mississippi in 2014, and later to Cape Girardeau in 2019, when she began to start her business Anne van Lucy Papercrafts.

Spaller-Brown once enjoyed this activity just as a hobby, but has now created a full-time career in paper crafting.

She believes she became interested in paper crafting as far back as 2012.

Photo by Jelani Days

“Every other job I had was working with your head, and I wanted something that was hands-on and practiced my creativity,” Spaller-Brown said.

Spaller-Brown has a degree in american literature and culture and explained that her education background influenced her love for teaching, which led her to host these classes.

She hopes that what people take away from her classes is that you can still be creative without being good at traditional art forms like drawing or painting.

“I want people to also be successful when they are being creative, I don't want them to feel overwhelmed or give up on artistic endeavors, I want them to have an end product that they feel happy with,” Spaller-Brown said.

She hopes that these classes will be a time when friends, family members, or like-minded people can have fun and feel like they are part of a group. Spaller-Brown wants these activities to be a time where people forget about their stress, reconnect with their artistic side, and just feel the satisfaction of being successful at something.

In the future, Spaller-Brown’s goal is to show people their potential when it comes to starting their own businesses or being entrepreneurs.

“Even if I can be an inspiration to someone when it comes to doing their own thing and growing your own business. That’s what keeps me motivated,” Spaller-Brown said. “Just take your unique skill set and don’t be afraid to turn that into something.”

Spaller-Brown’s next paper crafting session will be Saturday, Sept. 28 at Bloom Studio & Gifts from 2 to 4 p.m.

Comments