Quilling

So the other day I decided to get back into quilling. For those of you who don't know, quilling is a paper art where you take thin strips of paper and roll them to make paper filigree. It can be quite a hard art, as it requires nimble fingers, patience and perfection to get the finished work looking right. Thankfully I have all these (well more perfection than patience). Yesterday I started off with something simple. Just a plain 5 petal flower with a leaf and centre.

As you can see, I have coiled the paper and then glued the end after letting it expand. I then pinched one end of the coil to make a tear drop shape. After repeating this 5 times, I glued the 5 petals together. For the centre I tightly coiled (as in, I didn't let the coil expand) a yellow strip of paper and glued the end. I then placed this in the middle of the petals as the flowers centre. For the leaf, another expanded coil, but this time, instead of just pinching one end of the coil, I pinched the opposite end as well to make a marquise. For added elegance, I curled the end of the leaf.

After completing this, I was confident I had revived my talent and could move onto projects with more difficulty. So this morning. I made a design that I put on the front of a card.

On the gold card, I made 3 pink roses, by folding and turning the paper around my quilling tool, then glued all 3 to make a bunch. I then took some green paper and quilled 3 marquises for the leaves, again curling the corners for elegance. I also added an "S" scroll out of the same green paper to make a vine. I repeated the idea of the vine on the outside of the gold card, with longer strips of paper and then added some rose buds but quilling 2 circles out of the same pink paper and then pinching them to make 2 half moons. Again the leaves were made with marquise coils.

As a first attempt at making a card using quilling, I am very pleased with the result. Next I want to try and make flowers using a technique called fringing so I will keep you posted on that. :) 

Also, as a side note, I have almost completed my cross-stitch and shall post it up when I have. :)

The New Government.

Well finally, after 2 and a half weeks, we finally have a government in power. And it's Labor. Narrowly.

Well I for one, am not happy with this. I didn't vote for Labor because I didn't want them in power. Now I know what you are thinking. How can one vote change a thing? Well weren't we told that our vote was a valuable thing and that we should use it well? And use it well Australia did. Well, except for those idiots who decided to cast informal votes. But I'll get to that later. Now, according to EVERY statistic on the election, the Coalition won the most seats with primary AND preference votes (which in my opinion make election unnecessarily confusing). But then how did Labor come to power? Oh yeah, those 3 rural independents; Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor. The entire outcome of an election should not hang in the balance of 3 people. Aren't the Australian public supposed to decide who they want in as government? These three politicians have had the country on the edge of its seat for over 2 weeks. But did they really need to? Well I for one didn't think so. Sure, you have to wait 13 days for the overseas postal votes to arrive and be counted, but after that, each day they prolonged their decision, was a day wasted. The government could have made 1,000 decisions in the time it took them to decide who to back! OK, so maybe I exaggerate a bit, but at the least, the new government could have chosen its cabinet and Parliament would've been open again. Yes, it was a big decision to make, but they had plenty of time in which to decide in the 13 days. They did not need to extend the wait to 17 days.

But I guess there's nothing we can do about that now, at least we can be thankful that we now have a government and that everything can return to normal. Back to the election however. To start with, this election has seen a lot of first time voters come onto the scene, and I was one of them. Now a lot of young voters don't like the idea of listening to politions ramble on and on about things that aren't going to affect them right? Well wrong. In the fact that yes, whoever is in government will affect you life. That's the idea. Most young voters don't care who got in and so didn't bother voting properly, which is a real shame, because they are the future of this country and are we going to end up in a country where democracy fails because the generations don't care who is in power? Another popular tactic was to vote by closing your eyes and picking a box, or by looking at the names, and voting on who had the most appealing name (yes I am talking about the Australian Sex Party.) Now I have nothing against this party even though I didn't vote for them (I'm a Nationals girl) because I like what they stand for (same sex marriages, no censorship on the net etc), but how many people who voted for them, voted because of what they stood for? I'm afraid that people (especially young voters) would have voted for them because of their name.

Which brings me to another point that has disappointed me this election. The number of people who didn't vote for the Coalition because Tony Abbot is sexist, or voted for Labor because Julia Gillard is the first female PM this country has seen (which she is not, she became PM by default after kicking Rudd out, and even after this election she still wasn't the first female PM voted in by the Australian government as it was the 3 independents who kept her in power). The idea of democracy is that we don't vote for a PERSON, but we vote for a PARTY of people who believe in what we believe.
But who am I to say that? I'm just one person, with only one vote ;P