Quilled Borders

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all have a wonderful day surrounded by family and friends . . . and once everyone has gone home and you recover from all that turkey, you’ll probably start thinking about all of that quilling you wanted to get done before Christmas. I have finally finished all of my special orders and can now concentrate on quilling some fun stuff. I have been working on a really special piece for my best friend, but I'lll save that for another day. What I wanted to talk about today is borders.

I recently had someone ask me about doing borders. Borders are usually placed around something, a verse, a photograph, a wedding invitation, just to name a few. There are lots of ways to do borders, you can run a border across the top and bottom of a piece, on opposite corners (one of my favorites), or all the way around the item you are “framing” with your quilling. Judy Cardinals book B5987 Quilled Borders & Motifs demonstrates borders using themes. An example of this is one of her baby borders which includes quilled baby bottles, rattles, and safety pins. Claire Choi’s book The Art of Paper Quilling has a whole section on borders. In the section on cards, she uses borders (mostly floral) to surround the sentiment on the front of the card, like “love”. The borders she uses on some of the framed pieces are usually in opposite corners. When working on opposite corners, you can keep the quilling symmetrical, using the same flowers or shapes in the same colors so they are “mirror images” of each other. The roses and calla lily border is one of these as is my top and bottom designs, while in the piece with the quilled ribbon the flowers are done in different colors and placed without regard to “matching’ the design on the opposite corner.

I think the borders that are the most daunting, are the ones that go all around the opening or the edge of the frame. I will tell you how I plan these out. If I am working with a rectangular border, I start in the corners. I usually make some shapes and “play” with them while they are dry to decide how I want the border to look. Then I start to work in from towards the center, adding shapes to complete the border. In this way, if your spacing is a little off and you have a gap in the center, you can just add one additional quill. Another tip: if the piece is a rectangle, I do the four corners first and then start working across the top and bottom at the same time; once the top and bottom are done then I start working on the two sides. This is particularly important if the design is complex.

If I am working on an oval border, I start at the centers (top and bottom, left and right) and then work inward. I have included some pictures here, these are fairly simple borders, but if you want to see totally awesome all around borders you need to go to Quillin From the Heart Clareen Bankhead’s borders are incredible! Her work is so delicate and beautiful that I just enjoy going over to her site to admire it all.

Quilling Greeting Cards

Quilling Greeting Cards

I’ve decided not to buy greeting cards anymore. I’ve decided to make them . . . for a lot of different reasons. First of all I find it very difficult to find a card that says exactly what I want it to. For example: I didn’t actually meet my biological father until I was fifty five years old. He left to go off to the war when I was just a few days old. When he came back, both he and my mother were very different people and their marriage became a casualty of war. When I “found” him, I learned that I have a brother! Hallmark just doesn’t have a card that says what I need it to. I can spend hours, literally, reading through every card on the rack and then either leave empty handed or settle for something I’m not really pleased with. It didn’t really leave me much choice. Then of course there is the cost! It seems the only cards that appeal to me are the ones that cost megabucks.

Since I am a quiller, I would occasionally quill a card for a special occasion, (I always quill gift cards), and then worry about it getting squashed in the mail. Of course we all know how time consuming quilling can be, so I began to look for ways to “dress up” my quilled cards, to make them really pretty without having a lot of elaborate time consuming quilling. I started paying a little more attention to card making and scrapbooking books. Well, my worries are over; as card making grows in popularity here in the United States there is more and more information and ideas at your fingertips. We carry several books here at Whimsiquills specifically geared toward card making. My first cards were on plain white cardstock, and then I started trimming the edges of the cards with fancy edged quilling strips in matching colors. (I would cut the wide quilling strips with those decorative edge scissors.) Then I moved on to some tri-fold cards with decorative cut outs like hearts, ovals, and rectangles. I liked the openings because they “framed” the quilling, I would use a contrasting color as the background in the opening.

My daughter, who is into scrapbooking, told me about the decorative borders she used in scrapbooking, so I started looking at borders and border punches; it was just a logical progression to start using some of these ideas in my cards. Since I was enjoying using these, I decided to include them in the Whimsiquills line. Funny how things happen. One of my suppliers, Paplin Products, asked if I would be interested in seeing some cardboard mailers . . . perfect for mailing quilled greeting cards! Of course I was interested! Then they asked me what I thought about a line of colored cards and envelopes. At first I wasn’t sure about how the quilling would look on the colored cards. But I remembered doing some Easter quilling for Family Circle magazine several years ago. The cards they sent were colored . . . I got a lot of calls about those colored cards. At the time, I checked with Family Circle and they told me they had bought the cards at a little boutique. Paplin sent me some samples and I really enjoyed working with them. I used some circle border punches to “frame” the quilling on some of them. Circle punch On others, I combined some of the border punches to dress up the cards. The small designs I had created for the Accord quilling calendars were perfect for the cards. Combined border punches. There are tons of samples on the cards and scrapbook link .

Of course after you make your pretty handmade card, you have to decide what you want it to say. There are some great sites on the internet like http://www.verses4cards.co.uk/ and http://quotegarden.com/ These are just a couple of sites, there are tons more out there. You can print out a verse in a pretty or fun font and attach it to the inside of your card. Of course if your handwriting is nice or if you know calligraphy you can write your verse. I use a removable adhesive called Dotto to attach the “verse” to the inside of the card. The verse can be removed and the card can be recycled! How about that!! You can have your own line of “green” cards, save gas by making them at home, save money by not buying the fancy commercial greeting cards, and your cards can be recycled!

Digital Quilling

Digital Quilling

Actually, I can’t take credit for finding this site, Debbie, my right arm, did. She saw a picture and the caption “A box full of Quilling paper filigree pieces new in the Shoppe”. She printed it out and ran upstairs to show me. My initial thought was that it was a kit of some sort, but then I thought, how can that possibly be? It said there were 230 quilling pieces . . . in several different color combinations ready for you to be creative with them and arrange them into patterns for corners of photos or frames and pages.” I probably reread that caption three times before I realized that I had missed the words “on individual files” . . . then I realized I was looking at DIGITAL QUILLING!!! HI-TECH QUILLING!!!!! How cool is that! I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around it! Of course, my next step was to try and learn a little more about it. I sent an email to “Blushbutter” the creator. Her name is Vanessa and she, as it turns out lives in Australia. She told me she started quilling about 11 years ago when her oldest child was 4 years old. Vanessa said after studying graphic design 6 years ago and having two more boys, she found little time for quilling. She finally decided to make a digital quilling kit. In her email to me she said, “I am sure you can appreciate the skill taken to digitally cut the pieces out of the backgrounds of my cards which has taken many hours of patience, but it’s been worth it as a lot my customers who have adored the quilling craft in their younger years but don’t have the fine motor skills of their fingers either from arthritis or swelling anymore can now do the craft digitally.” Actually, I can only imagine the skill it must take to do this as I am totally clueless about digital anything.

My scrapbooking, like my quilling, is the paper and scissor variety. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to create a digital page combining my work. I did have a very interesting conversation recently with Paige Meeker, a fellow quilling guild member, and she was telling me a little bit about digital scrapbooking and gave me a couple of sites to check out. My daughter, who is an avid scrap booker and a not-so-avid quiller has also volunteered to help educate her poor-over-the-hill mother in the ways of all things digital. (Did I tell you she used 1/8” navy blue quilling strips to pin stripe the pages of her New York Yankees scrapbook?) I will keep you posted as I learn more about this! Here is a link so you can see for yourself. Take some time to browse; there is lots of interesting stuff . . . even if I don’t know how to use most of it. http://digitalscrapbookpreviews.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=3703

BTW Here is another interesting link; this is a blog whose author/artist creates a skull a day! That’s right . . . a skull a day! I have no idea why, but the interesting thing is that one of the skulls is QUILLED! It’s really neat . . . I had to add my comment when someone referred to quilling as an “old lady craft”, little do they know that not ALL of us are old ladies, although I did acknowledge that I am well on my way. Here is the link http://skulladay.blogspot.com/2008/04/312-quilled-skull.html Enjoy!

My Quilling Dream Store

My quilling “Dream store”

As all of you know by now, I have been quilling for 30+ years and I am still quilling. Over the years I have taught, lectured and demonstrated, written quilling newsletters, served as a regional representative here in the USA for the English guild, and held office in the North American Quilling Guild. Quilling is important to me and working to keep it alive is important to me. This in spite of carpal tunnel in both hands (got it fixed), trigger thumb in both hands (that one the chiropractor and acupuncture fixed), plus all of the joys the aging process brings (like bifocals and aching backs). I think I have beat the migraines and am now dealing with vertigo (acupuncture again) . . . but through it all, I managed to keep quilling. I was quilling when my hands were still in bandages after the carpal tunnel surgery. I’ve quilled with my hand in a splint. I switched my work area over to a drafting table to help my neck and back, but still kept quilling. I love it! I love the challenge of trying something new. I love the look on someone’s face when it finally hits them that they are looking at paper. I love the “light bulb” moment when a newbie realizes that THEY can quill. I love it when someone I have taught or helped inn some way creates something that is awesome!

I explained in an earlier post that when I couldn’t find supplies in the stores, I started buying wholesale, so I would have what I needed and be able to make the supplies available to other quillers. I hear quillers all the time wishing that there was a store that carried a full line of quilling supplies. If someone asked me what my “dream “quilling store would be like, this is what I would say. “I would like to shop in a store where the people actually know what quilling is and be familiar with the products they carry and be willing to answer questions. If I called the store to see if they carried a specific product, I would get to talk to a real person (knowledgeable) and not get stuck in voice mail jail where I spend 15 minutes (on my dime) listening to an automated voice telling me to press #1, #2 etc. and never get to talk to a human. I would like to be able to leave a message and get a call back within a reasonable length of time. I would like to shop in a store that carries a HUGE selection of papers, in all the colors and sizes I like to use. I don’t usually use kits, but my dream store would have lots of kits from different quillers and manufacturers, because even if you don’t quill from a kit, you can get all kinds of good ideas from them. My “dream” store would have lots and lots of books on quilling, not just one or two, because you always learn something new from a book even if it just the inspiration to try a new technique. If I were physically unable to get to my “dream” store, it would have a terrific web site with pictures of everything they carry. I would be able to go to the web site and type in the word “green” and see how many green papers they had, or click on “gilded papers” and see all of the colors available. My “dream” store would have lots of tools for me to choose from and all of the latest items available in the quilling world.”

Here’s where it gets exciting for me. At the risk of blowing my own horn, I finally have my “dream” store and it’s called http://www.whimsiquills.com/ . I’ve spent literally years building up an inventory that includes a huge variety of specialty papers, plus all of the “standard’ stuff. We not only carry papers, tools, books, and kits from the big guys like Lake City, Paplin, Quilled Creations, and J&J, but we carry kits and books from the little guys, like Quirky Quillers, Jinny Alexander, Paige Meeker, Cathy Schlim, and Bruce Yanochek) I checked every plastic bottle I could get my hands on before I decided on the soft plastic fine tip glue bottle we sell. (Ours is nice and soft so tired fingers like mine can squeeze it easily). We carry a variety of tools so you have a choice of fringers or slotted tools.

We have been working on our new web site for four months and are almost finished. I am really proud of it and would like to invite you to take a look. We have broken our product line down into every possible category to make it easy to find what you are looking for, more than 1,300 items. We have a wonderful photo gallery and a book review page, and of course a link right here to our blog. We have a ‘blow out sale” page for items that are being discontinued at really great prices. The only thing the web site doesn’t do is give me the opportunity to “chat” with you the way I can here. I’d love to hear back from you . . . maybe there is something you think I should add to my dream store. Let me know.

Quilling for Scrapbooks and Photo Albums

Quilling in Scrapbooks and Photo Albums

I am not the scrapbooking person in our family. That would be my daughter Christie, the one who manages my Ebay store, juggles a full time job, takes care of a husband and two dogs, and makes wonderful scrapbooks. A diehard Yankees fan, she did a great scrapbook to commemorate her first game at Yankee Stadium. What does this have to do with quilling? She used 1/8" navy blue quilling strips to PIN STRIPE the pages for her Yankee Scrapbook.

I, on the otherhand, have a thing about preserving our family history and passing it on to my kids. Between my husband and myself we have five children, all grown. I started keeping family photo albums years ago, you know, take the pictures and then stick them in one of those '"sticky page" things they used to call photo albums. Then a distant relative passed away and when we started going through "stuff", there were all of these pictures with no names or explanations. That's when I decided to redo the family photos. Now they look more like a family story book, with funny little annecdotes about how and when we got the dogs, graduations, weddings,silly pictures etc. After seeing my daughter's scrapbooks, I decided to dress up my photo albums as well. I use quilling strips to border most of my pages, sometimes combining different widths, sometime using border punches on the wider strips. I always have just the right colors to go with all of my pages because the strips come in so many colors. They may not have an adhesive backing like some of the border strips sold in stores, but I use my fine tip glue bottle and I'm good to go.

Several years ago, I was asked to do a taping for the DIY network on quilling for scrapbooks. That really made me think about adding quilling to my own pages. Now, I have ten volumes of family photos, and trust me, there are a lot more quilling paper borders, than there is quilling, but little by little I am going back and adding a little quilled here and there. The albums all sit on a book shelf in our living room and everytime we are all together somebody pulls one out and starts reminiscing. I have put some of my favorite pages up in the picture gallery on my "new" web site http://www.Whimsiquills.com with little blurbs about each one.

It's kind of funny, there are quillers who don't even want to hear about scrapbooks (I think scrapbooking is a lot more expensive than quilling), and when the scrabooking craze first started there were people who said you couldn't use quilling because it wasn't flat. But as scrapbooking has evolved, and more and more dimensional embellishments are being added, the interest in quilling continues to grow. At Whimsiquills, we try to encourage that growth and carry a number of kits and books geared toward scrapbooking. I think the designs in the Accord quilling calendar are perfect for scrapbooking. Twenty years ago, the quillers worried that quilling might die out, today is seems to be alive and well becoming more main stream every day. Hooray!! That's just what we wanted, and the scrapbookers are helping.

Quilling Applications (Where do you put your quillling?)

Where do you put your quilling?

I thought, on the heels of my little blog about Megan Wilson, that maybe it was time to talk about some of the many applications quilling has. I think I may have mentioned that my first exposure to quilling was a quilled snowflake. Quilled snowflakes look so lacey and delicate and I still love to make them, hang them in my windows and give them as little gifts. But when I decided to sell my work, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to earn much selling such a small item. Over the years, I have done quilling around literally hundreds and hundreds of wedding invitations, anniversary announcements, poems and birth announcements. These became my “bread and butter” items; there was always a market for these occasions when people are looking for a very special gift. But there are so many other applications for quilling; I usually tell people the only thing that limits them is their own imagination! Here a just a few things that I have tried or seen others try.

I still have a quilled switch plate in the Whimsiquills room that is almost twenty years old. It is a fairly simple design on a wooden heart shaped switch plate that I bought in a craft store and painted to match the woodwork in the room.

I had quilling around a mirror mounted on a wood background with a towel bar underneath in my bathroom for years until just a couple of years ago when we remodeled the bathroom. We did knock a few of the quills off from time to time, but I just replaced them . . . it was kind of neat!
I designed and quilled a chess board to go with the chess men I made from a kit. Once I made the men, I felt they had to go with a quilled board. That design is available in Malinda Johnston’s Book of Paper Quilling on pages 105-106.

Dimensional or free standing quilling can be challenging but very exciting. Jinny Alexander’s Jinisans, my tea cups and saucer, and Christmas tree all pictured here on the blog are just a few examples.

Quilled greeting cards are very popular, especially when you look at the prices for greeting cards in card shops! Why not make a really special card with your personal touch? Several years ago (2003) I did some quilled eggs and Easter cards for Family Circle magazine at their request. They sent me some colored cards with oval cut outs etc. I got a bunch of calls asking where to buy those cards; Family Circle told me they had purchased them from a little boutique in New York. Now those kinds of cards are available in craft stores and on the internet Combine your quilling with rubber stamping, embossing, Pergamano (parchment craft), and embroidery to make some very unique greeting cards. I know others have done this as well, make a removable quilled Christmas ornament part of the greeting card. I make matching quilled gift tags to give to all of my customers with their orders.

One of my quilling friends, Rick Whitman, loves to do counted cross stitch. She will stitch an appropriate Bible verse, then mat it and quill on the mat and frame the whole thing for a very special gift item.

One of the more recent applications is the use of quilling in scrap books.
Quilled jewelry, I’ve made quilled pins, earrings and stick pins. There are a couple of kits and books with jewelry designs, and we are including quilled jewelry in the 2009 Accord quilling calendar. Of course the Quilling calendar (2008 now available) was a really unique application for quilling. The first calendar was done for 2007; each page has a quilling design, the directions are printed on the back of the page, and the strips are on the bottom of the page.

And last but not least we have the Megan Wilson application just in case you missed it! http://www.meganwilson.com/projects.php

I would love to hear what everyone else is doing, I’m sure I couldn’t have possibly covered everything. Share your ideas!

FYI there are two new posts on the Whimsiquills blog, one about a very interesting artist and another on the many applications of quilling. Also for those concerned about the 2007/2008 calendars I have put in a call to Accord publishing, but I really think the two calendars on the web are actually same calendar, the 2008; (even though one picture shows the 2007 box. I was told that the leftover 2007 calendars were destroyed which upset me more than a little.) The publisher has a suggested retail price ($14.99 for the 2008 calendar), but anyone selling them can charge whatever they choose. Mega calendar is just one of the distributors that Accord (Andrews McMeil) sells to. If I find out anything different, I will be sure to post to the groups.