Penguin on Skates

Happy Holidays! I went for my first acupuncture treatment last week-no miracles yet, but maybe a little improvement. I’m still not quilling, but I thought I would share this little guy. I put him on my Christmas cards last year, he is surprisingly simple to make. Here are the directions:

Penguin on skates

1 White tight coil (48”) wrapped in black for body
4 Black crescents (3”) for back of penguin
1 White tight coil (24”) wrapped in black for head
2 Yellow crescents (2”) for feet
2 Green (.5”) curled at one end for skates
1 Red bunny ear (3”) for hat
1 Green strip (1”) fringed for pom on hat
1 Yellow tiny strip folded for beak

Arrange as shown

Flower Pot

I haven’t been doing much quilling lately. I’ve been having “issues” with my neck, shoulder, and arm; partially due to an accident I was involved in over the summer and I think the hand is starting to wear out. Next week I am going to try acupuncture; I’m keeping my fingers (on the other hand) crossed. But when I got some new papers in I decided to play a little. We finally got a terracotta color in which made me decide to do a little flower pot treasure box. The flowers on the top are all done with our new translucent vellum strips. I found them easy to work with and love the colors. I did have a little trouble fringing them; I think they are probably too smooth for the fringer to grab them and feed them through. What I did to solve that challenge was put a regular strip of quilling paper on top of the vellum strip and feed them both through at the same time . . . perfect!

For those of you who might want to try this, I used 15 strips of terracotta to make the flower pot. It measures about 1 1/2" across the top so it is big enough to old a small treaure. It did take several tries before I got the shape I wanted, but since I fed the strips in (rather than gluing them to one another), it was easy to start over. I coated the inside with glue and put it aside. Since I wanted the flowers to look like they were “in” the flower pot, I made the top a little smaller than the bottom so it would fit into the flower pot. I was a little surprised that it took 20 strips of the kiwi vellum to make a smaller top. I mounded the top slightly and coated the inside with glue. Then I just played and made some flowers using 3” translucent strips, I really like the colors!