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. :)