Transforming hanji -- handmade Korean mulberry paper -- into something both useful and beautiful is truly a Korean traditional art. For centuries Koreans have fashioned all sorts of beautiful and exotic-looking boxes and even furniture by simply using the hanji to cover layers of dense cardboard and then applying several coats of glue. The end result is a beautiful box or piece of furniture that is quite hard and durable, except being made of paper, it can't withstand much moisture.
I have many colors of hanji. Some are definitely more textured than others, and not all are hand-dipped. The bright colors to the right (below) are machine manufactured "hanji" -- much cheaper, not so easy to work with and hard to obscure layers, but for some artwork like papering glass bottles, this bright cheaper stuff worked great! I just cut out little squares and rectangles of varying sizes and glued them on using the hanji-style painting method, which is much like decoupage!
For making the the butterflies I just folded a somewhat stiff piece of black paper in half and cut out a butterfly. Very easy and quite classy to look at. One side of the bottle has two larger butterflies while the opposite side has three. Below is the finished decorative product. To its left is a hanji craft tissue box a friend made and gave me. It's the box that really inspired me to take a hanji craft class and learn the art form for myself.
