Quilling - Tea cups to skulls??

I didn’t get a blog up this past Friday (long story), but I thought everyone would enjoy this. Since I put my quilled tea cup and saucer up on my web site, I have gotten dozens of requests for instructions, patterns etc. Unfortunately, I don’t use patterns and hate to write them down, but I did put together some general directions to give people an idea of how to get started. these are the directions I send out:

The tea cup was a product of my imagination so there is no pattern. I started out by making a tight roll with approximately ten full length strips for the base of the cup. I put the tight roll in the bottom of an actual tea cup and then started adding the quilling one row at a time. After each row dried, I would loosen it from the sides of the cup, then place it back into the cup and build the next row of quilling. When I had built the cup up to tea cup size, I took it out of the cup and made the handle. The saucer was done in exactly the same way. When both pieces were done I sprayed them with several light coats of Stiffen Stuff, which makes the paper nice and stiff without changing the color or adding a shine to it.

I also made a matching tea pot. Again I started with a large tight roll for the base. Then I made a mold of the tea pot and then cut it in half. I lined the inside of the mold with plastic wrap and then started placing the quilling inside of the mold, working from the bottom up. The tricky part was gluing the two halves together.

An important note, be sure to use paper from the same dye lots for these projects. The whites can be very different and will show up in the finished pieceLast week I received this email from someone who had asked for those directions. Her name is Kim Wallace.

”About six weeks ago I ran across your website and fell in love with your tea cup and saucer! You were kind enough to tell me how you did it so I made one myself. It came out nice so I wanted to try something a little different. Attached is a skull I did for my husbands haunted house he does each year at Halloween. It is not perfect but he and I both love it. Thanks you for you instructions and inspiration. by the way...I only started quilling about two months ago and as you can see, I am hooked.”

She sent me a picture of a skull she had quilled. I wrote back to her and asked if I could share it with all of you. I also asked if she would share her tea cup as well. Here they are, along with a picture of the ceramic skull she used as a mold.Way to go, Kim!! And she has only been quilling two months!! For all of you who are thinking about trying something different . . .go for it! Here is the mold Kim used. Here is Kim's tea cup.