Another Scissor Roadside Attraction

The next time you’re heading west on the I-90 out of town from Gillette, WY, take the north exit on South Burma and you’ll find yourself just a few minutes away from the Rock-Paper-Scissors Sculpture.

Time it right and you can celebrate World Rock, Paper, Scissors Day on August 27th.

The roadside attraction stands outside the Gillette News Record and features the three different items stacked on top of another with the scissors on top. 

We’ve never been but the town looks sweet, even though the city guide says you stand a 1 in 49 chance of becoming a victim of either a violent or a property crime. The sculpture itself is cool and we traced one of the artists, Kevin Box, down to the Santa Fe area where he makes different versions of it, as well as some interesting origami garden structures.

More of a museum and craft scissors kind of traveller? The Ciselier team has done some artisan workshop visits in Europe but the staff are not accustomed to scissor geeks walking in off the street. One company that is particularly evangelical about the craft of making heritage scissors is Ernest Wright in Sheffield, England. 

Lots of scissor things to do in Sheffield

We profiled Ernest Wright recently and you can read more about their plans to renovate their current space and add space where tourists can watch the magic of grinding, polishing and ‘puttertogethering’

The company won a 2020 Heritage Craft Award for its efforts to keep an endangered craft alive and well. While it maintains strong ties to traditional quality scissor manufacturing, Ernest Wright intends to remain very much alive and not become a museum. Luckily, there are actual museums dedicated to Sheffield’s history as a center of cutlery and scissors manufacturing.

Start your museum visits with the Kelham Island Museum in the center of town, where you can get hundreds of years of industrial history, including information on master cutlers and scissor makers. Museums Sheffield has more information on galleries and collections.

Scissor destinations in Germany’s City of Blades

The name Solingen is synonymous with quality steel manufacturing, from cutlery to knives, swords and, of course, scissors. The old German town north of Düsseldorf is still the country’s centre of steel manufacturing, a title it has been able to claim for a thousand years.

READ MORE:

• Sheffield: The city that put England’s scissors on the map
• Solingen: The Klingenstadt, or City of Blades

Other ideas for combining scissors and travel:

• Traveling in France? The Pays de Langres tourism board has put together a little resource if you want set up a tour of craft makers and retailers of scissors and knives in Nogent and the surrounding area.
• Don’t forget some of the bigger museums because they have a lot of collections and that can mean really cool scissors. We often fall down rabbit holes scrolling through collections at various museums. For example:
• The Harvard Art Museum
• London’s art and design collection at V&A South Kensington
• The F. Mares Museum in Barcelona
• There is more than great portraits at the Frick in Manhattan