PAPER LADIES DEDICATED TO A CREATIVE SPIRIT, a sense of adventure,
an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to try
something new led entrepreneurs Kaiya
McCormick and Erica Westenberger to
found Aluna Works, a papermaking studio
and shop located in the Castle Street Arts
and Antique District in Wilmington.
The two women were artists before they
were entrepreneurs. Thus, uniqueness and
craftsmanship are the hallmarks of the start-up
business launched 16 months ago. They
make all their paper by hand, sell the prod-ucts
in their store, and teach classes in the
studio.
“We make all of the paper from scratch,”
Westenberger says. “We do all of the design
work. We make journals, stationery, plant-able
paper. We also have flower petal paper.
There’s a lot of cool things you can do. You
can add iridescence to it. You can include
fabric between two pieces of paper. You can
incorporate plants. You can do a lot.”
The two women met at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where they
were studying fiber arts.
McCormick graduated in 2013, worked
in odd jobs in Chicago for a year, moved to
New Orleans to work in an art gallery, then
interned at Dieu Donné, a New York studio
founded “to explore the untapped potential
of hand papermaking as an art medium.”
“That was an amazing experience,” she
says. “I got to work with a bunch of differ-ent
artists, I got to work in production. I
had known papermaking from when I was in
school, but I didn’t know all the background
that goes into it and how much time it takes
to make all the pulp.”
Erica Westenberger and Kaiya McCormick in their
papermaking shop and studio on Castle Street.
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WBM april 2018