While a sparrow sings sweetly outside her rose-covered cottage, Sharyn Sowell’s silver scissors slip in at the chorus. Snip, snip, snippity-snip, she starts to shape and sculpt one of her signature silhouettes.

“Real life is the best fairy tale,” she says as she cradles the plain-paper Victorian valentine in her hand. “When you stop to look at your own life, it’s better than the best story ever written.”

For Sharyn, the story is all about the little things, the everyday miracles that make daydreams come true. It’s the bumblebee as it does its dizzy dance in the daisies. It’s the autumn leaves as they fall from the sky like red and gold confetti. It’s the cute curly-haired girl gently blowing on a dandelion to scatter its snowflake-like seeds to the wind.

And it’s scissors cutting paper. “I love to make something complex out of nothing,” she says. “I’m a paper cutter.  I carry everything I need in my pocket. What is more simple than that?”

Sharyn made her first silhouette two decades ago when her two sons were youngsters – she cut up lunch bags with the scissors of her husband’s Swiss Army knife to amuse them during a family vacation – and now her cutout and calligraphy creations literally have leapt off the page, appearing on everything from gift bags and china to Christmas stockings and garden flags. “Taking time to marvel, that’s what shows up in my work,” she says. “This is a huge part of my work, and I want to encourage other people to see the wonders of the world as I do.”

To be inspired, she needs look no further than Mount Vernon, Washington, and  her own backyard cottage-style studio, which her sons made for her. If, only any given day, the hollyhocks and foxglove in the English garden don’t charm her, she can munch her way along the raspberry hedge, confer with the tiny toad that takes up residence on her doorstep or mull things over in the gazebo with her constant companions, Caesar, her Beagle mix, and Charlie, her Newfoundland retriever.

Sharyn surveys her studio, where paper scraps sprinkle the floor like salt and pepper. The potted wild violets playing peek-a-boo in the drawers, the bird’s nest on the windowsill, the photos a friend sent her of a quaint Paris shoe shop – she never knows which will strike her fancy and sharpen her scissors.

“When I’m cutting, I lose track of time,” she says. “I look up and hours have gone by. I love to create things that combine the old and the new. Sometimes, I cut up dog-eared books or sheet music, and my favorite scissors are the ones from my mother’s kitchen drawer that she bought at Woolworths when I was a little girl.”

Suddenly, the sparrow’s solo is silenced. Sharyn, scissors in hand, peeks through the doily-like curtains, the ones she cut from common butcher paper, to see the next chapter of the fairy tale she calls real life play out. “Everything for me,” she says, smiling as her scissors sing their snip-snip song, “is pea sweet.”