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Friday, April 18, 2008

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!

1 comment:

Rachel S said...

I'm 25 and I love quilling...it may be an old craft but that oesn't make it an old lady craft :)