Papercutting, eh? Seriously, how hard can it be? The answer is: very. Very, very, very.

Leaving aside the fact that you have to design the thing, there’s the no-small-matter of leaving enough strips (meaning hair’s breadth slivers of paper) to hold it all together, and being able to cut straight lines with a scalpel and curved ones with something that resembles a pencil with a wobbly lead.

Which is why I got told off for bad cutting at school and became a journalist and why Kyleigh Orlebar now earns her living producing the most exquisite artworks based on this fine and beautiful art.

Showing me round her Wimborne workshop, Kyleigh explains how her business started with Valentine’s gift she made for her husband in 2010.

“I’d seen papercuts online and had the inspiration of creating a line from our first dance which was Ray LaMontagne’s ‘‘Forever my friend’: ‘Forever my friend, forever my love.’ It meant so much to us so I thought I’ll give it a go.”

That was the easy bit; working out how the design would hang together without tearing took longer. “I had to play with the ascenders and descenders (typography talk for the serifs on letters) to see how they would connect,” she says.

She enjoyed the process of cutting out and once she’d discovered where to buy a floating frame – so the design could be seen through the picture’s glass – she quickly made the gift up.

“He loved it,” she says.

She put it on Facebook and it received so many likes – plus imploring from friends and family to create them for her that she had ‘a Eureka moment’ and decided to make it her career.

“I’m a graphic designer by trade and worked for an agency in Bournemouth where I also did web design and photo retouching,” she says.

These skills all came into play when she decided to start up. Even the fact that she was laid off from work a few days a week helped because: “It gave me time to think.”

Her first big break came when she was accepted by online craft retailer NotOnTheHighStreet, the second when Dragon Theo Paphitis picked up her design and idea as one of #SBS retweets.

“After he did this the spike in my Twitter followers and in sales was incredible,” says Kyleigh.

“I was invited to go to Edgbaston cricket ground to the SBS winners event and got to meet him.”

She was picked to join the famously choosy NotOnTheHighStreet within two hours of applying.

Now she is working flat out, with the assistance of business partner Amanda Brown, producing beautiful papercut trees, as well as the word and lyric cuts which are her signature.

She has a shop and workshop in Wimborne and plans for further expansion. It’s a pretty impressive record but even more so when you learn that the business was run alongside of her third pregnancy and is now juggled between looking after her three-year-old, as well as her two teenage daughters.

But, as Kyleigh says: “When you love what you do as much as this, it doesn’t really feel like work!”

kyleighspapercuts.co.uk