I'm not really doing this 'properly'. I didn't invest in pre-cut quilling strips or tools or anything. I did look at a few pictures of the sort of things people make with this technique before I started, but I didn't exactly have a full plan for what this was going to look like. I'm just playing with an idea to see what happens.
First I cut 1cm strips of brightly coloured paper, then I started rolling them around a skewer to make coils. Seems simple enough.
I also coiled some of my strips at both ends. Then I pinched some of those in the middle to make little hearts.
Then I started thinking about what else you can do and decided to actually look up some quilling techniques. I came across something called 'combing', which is where you wrap your paper strip around a comb, which turned out to be quite time consuming. This, plus pinching, is used to make teardrop shapes.
I also learned that some people make teardrops in two colours by gluing two quilling strips together before combing and pinching.
Then I remembered about eye shapes (roll a simple coil then pinch at both sides).
I kept making shapes until I felt like I had enough.
Time to make the frame. I say 'make'. I walked into a shop and bought a plain frame with a view to decorating it with my quills. (I had looked into buying a piece of glass the right size but shipping it to me didn't seem worth the delivery fee or the fossil fuels involved.) Then I made a paper tray for my art, which I glued onto the bought frame. And I created a border so it would look like the whole thing was made of green paper.
I painted the inside of my tray with PVA glue and placed all my quills inside. The great thing about PVA is it takes 8-12 hours to dry, so I had plenty of time to move things around when I didn't like it.
Then I left it to dry and put in a picture of The Youngling, which I'm not gonna show you 😋
This was fun. Next time I do quilling I might try making an actual picture.
