Quilling in Magazines

Just imagine strolling down the aisle of your local supermarket or drugstore and then looking over at the magazines next to the checkout counter . . . there staring back at you on the cover of a women’s magazine (not a craft magazine) is a beautiful quilled design. How exciting that would be! Beautiful quilling, right out there for everyone to see and “ooh and aah” over. There is such a magazine, but unfortunately it is not here in the United States.

My quilling friend, Malinda Johnston, (yes that Malinda Johnston, the one who authored so many quilling books and founded Lake City Crafts) gave me a call after she came back from her trip to Paris. While in France she took a side trip to the Netherlands to visit her friend Trees Tra, who is also a quiller. (Some of you may have some of Trees Tra’s quilling books.) At any rate, she gave Malinda a copy of a Dutch women’s magazine called Libelle. The cover of the magazine shown here was covered with a delightful quilled design. Malinda was kind enough to send me the magazine; not only was there quilling on the cover but many of the article titles were done in quilling. If the whole title wasn’t quilled the capital letters were. While I am sure copy write laws would prohibit showing you all of these pages, I can tell you they were awesome. An article about Club Tropicana had the letters CLUB quilled with tropical palm trees coming out of the letters. What a boost for the art of quilling! The style looked kind of familiar to me; I went through the magazine to see if the artist was listed. When I couldn’t find any reference to her, I emailed the magazine to inquire who the artist was. (I used the Google translator since my knowledge of the Dutch language is non-existent. I can read some German and was able to get the general idea of some of the articles, but certainly couldn’t make an inquiry in anything other than English. Isn’t the internet awesome?) I did get a reply, and as I expected the artist was Yulia Brodskaya. I am sure many of you have heard of her, her work has been the subject of many quilling blogs. Her web site says “Yulia Brodskaya was born in Russia (Moscow); prior to moving to the UK in 2004 she was interested in diverse creative practices ranging from Textile Painting, Origami and Collage to more traditional Fine Art practices. Following an MA in Graphic Communication (2006, University of Hertfordshire) she has continued to experiment and explore ways of bringing together all the things she likes most: typography, paper, and highly detailed hand-made craft objects.” Here is a link to her web site http://www.artyulia.com/ When you get there click on Illustration and then PAPERgraphic to see some of her awesome work.