This piece was commissioned by an aunt for her niece on the occasion of the niece’s bat mitzvah. Malkah has a theme running through her life about China and bamboo and has a love of panda bears, so those two visual elements had to be in the papercut.

I’ve never used bamboo in a papercut before and I must say, it really lends itself to the medium!

Another unusual element is the girl’s whole name – Malkah daughter of Ya’akov and Zipporah; usually, only the girl’s first or first and middle names are included. In this case, because Malkah’s mother is just finishing her conversion to Judaism, having her name included made the piece especially meaningful to the whole family.

(For the letter design I used Ismar David’s letters in JPS’s “Five Meggilot & Esther”.)