Happy New Year!

Seasons Greetings! I hope you are enjoying this festive season of holidays. I am spending some quiet time planning for 2009. For years, I have been quilling for my customers; this year I would like to try working on some projects just for the fun of it. I sell so many wonderful papers and hardly have the time to experiment with them myself. I have been spending some time visiting other quillers’ sites and blogs and am just amazed at all of the neat things I am finding. It is hard for me to even remember how isolated I felt as a new quiller in the 1970’s. Through the internet I have been able to reach out to quillers all over the world. Each of them has their own distinctive style; viewing them is truly inspirational and challenges me to start rethinking my own work. There are so many ideas out there that would never have occurred to me had I not been able to see them on my computer monitor. I have been pleasantly surprised to find a lot of moms who are home schooling their children and discovering quilling and sharing it with their children. This is surprising to me, since many elementary art school teachers are not familiar with quilling at all. These moms are researching new ways to keep their kids inspired and finding quilling. What a great way to keep little fingers busy! This also means there will be a new generation of quillers to “carry the torch” and hopefully pass it on to their children. But to get back to my plans for the new year. I will be reaching out to some of these quillers and asking their permission to feature them (and their work) on my blog. I am really excited about this, it will be a fun project, a way to meet some new quilling friends and perhaps inspire me, and maybe even you, to try some new projects. I wish you a Happy, Healthy, New Year!

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.

New Blog/Old Blog

New Blog/Old Blog

I have decided to move my blog from "my space" over to blogspot. I have no issues with myspace, but I think blogspot will be more flexible and easier for me as well as my readers. I am no "computer whiz-kid" so easier is definitely better in my book, besides, I am supposed to be quilling not reading up on computer stuff! This new location will not require anyone to "register" unless they want to and I will finally be able to put pictures right in my text. We have spent several days updating the blog topics and moving the graphics into the body of the text. Debbie is also adding more links so it will be easier to find related items on the web site. Debbie has already moved all previous blog topics over to the new site and will be able to list all of the topics so it will be easier for my readers to find what they are looking for. So keep checking back, I am pretty excited about this and hopeful that I will do a little more writing if I don't have to waste time trying to figure out what I really want to do. Make sense? I hope so.

Quilling Christmas Cards/Christmas Patterns/Designs

Quilling Christmas Cards/Christmas Patterns/Designs

I spoke with a quiller the other day who told me she wanted to make some special Christmas cards for her grandchildren. She wanted to put some quilling on the card that could be removed from the card and used as an ornament. It made me think back to some of the first times I put ornaments in cards. Apart from the obvious, not wanting them to get squished in the mail, I tried a few different ways of making and mounting my ornaments. My first attempts were just putting the ornaments in or on the cards gluing/taping the hanger to the card. But that allowed the ornament to kind of move around inside the envelope while it traveled from me to its destination. That was kind of tough on delicate type designs like snowflakes. Then I found these really neat clear plastic disks. I glued the ornament to the plastic disk and quilled a pretty border around the edge of the disk, but once again there was damage in transit. The glue just didn’t hold the quilling to the plastic; once it got bounced around in the mail some of the quilling just came loose. Next I cut 3” disks out of mat board because I knew the quilling would not come loose from the mat board. Unfortunately there is a front and a back to mat board, so I had to cut some kind of decorative paper to glue on the back of the mat board . . . and then of course some kind of decorative border to cover the cut edges of the mat boards. . . BUT they didn’t fall apart, in fact I still have a few of them.

In my conversation with this quiller, she told me she was using designs from one of the kits I had designed for Paplin products. She said she liked them because they were pretty basic and easy to do. She didn’t want to make very complicated or intricate snowflakes because she didn’t think the younger grandchildren would appreciate them. I went back to my web site (http://www.whimsiquills.com/) and realized I didn’t have any Christmas designs up in the free pattern section . . . so I whipped up a few for anyone else who was looking for simple Christmas card ideas. (Just scroll down on the home page and you will find a link for free patterns or you can click here) I used the circle border punch Dancing Daisy for the background; the tiny punched out daisy reminded me of a snowflake, but any circle border punch would look nice. These will be attached to the cards with a removable adhesive called “Dotto Glue Dots” so they can be easily lifted off the card and hung on a tree or in a window. The designs can be assembled right on the background. If you do not plan to use a background, assemble them on a piece of waxed paper. When dry, just peel the waxed paper off the back slowly and add a thread or metallic cord for a hanger. If you click on the image you can see how the design will look on one of our colored cards. To be sure they don’t get crushed in the holiday mail you can put them in a protective mailer. I have a few other I ideas I hope to add within the next couple of weeks, so be sure to check back. Enjoy!

New Husking Cards

New Husking Cards

Here is some exciting news for those of you who love husking, but don’t want to design your own patterns. Elizabeth’s Creations has just introduced new husking cards; these are 3” x 5” laminated cards with pre-designed husking patterns. You use them with your own work board and pins which keeps the price down to a reasonable $5.00 each.

For those of you who may not be familiar with husking; it is an interesting technique. Instead of rolling the paper the paper is wrapped around pins. Starting with pin #1, wrap it around the pin several times or to make a tiny glued loop around the pin, then wrap around pin #2, back to #1, around #3 back to #1 and so on. It is optional as to whether you want to put a dab of glue each time you get to #1, but you might want to the first time out. Once the shape has been completed,, I suggest that you twist the pins to remove them (just in case they got any glue on them) and then gently lift the finished piece off the board/card. Husking with pins has the advantage of making all of the shapes exactly the same size. It is especially pretty when done with specialty papers like two toned or graduated strips. You really get to see both sides of the strips because husking is much more “open” than traditional quilling. I also like to use gilded edge strips when I make husked snowflakes (I actually like gilded edge strips on my regular quilled snowflakes too); I like to used the blue gilded edge on white for my husked snowflakes.

Of course you can “do it yourself” with a piece of graph paper (on which you mark your pattern), waxed paper, a work board and pins. When I teach this technique that is what I use rather than having students invest in materials for a technique they may or may not enjoy. The down side of drawing your own designs on graph paper is that it wears out pretty quickly; the holes get larger and kind of sloppy. The laminated cards eliminate that problem; if you don’t feel like reinventing the wheel the pre marked pattern cards are a good idea.

We have carried Elizabeth’s Creations wooden husking boards for years, our customers have been very happy with them, although sometimes they have trouble deciding which one(s) they want. The laminated cards are 1/3 the price of the wood ones so you can get a bigger “bang for your buck”, no small consideration these days.

These cards have multiple sizes of each design on a card eliminating all of the guess work. Mary Elizabeth has 10 cards to start with more to come. Designs include: T001 Butterflies, Dragonflies and Flowers which includes 4 sizes of each petal/wing, T002 Classic Hearts in eight sizes, T003 Original Hearts in 7 sizes, and T004 Primitive Hearts with 10 sizes. (Mary Elizabeth says “These hearts are fun to make and can be used for many different designs . . . angel wings, flower petals, borders, butterflies, and oh yes . . . hearts) T010 the Snowflakes and More cards have three styles of snowflakes. There are five “nothing but holes” T005, T006, T007, T008, & T009 cards each with a different scale (i.e. 4 holes to an inch, right up to 8 holes per inch). The more dots per inch the smaller the grid, we do still carry that wonderful Dutch book “Quilling for Cards” by Janetta van Roekel-Wolters that has instructions for 21 husked designs. The book is written in Dutch and English; it is a great companion to the nothing but holes card.

Sister Consolata & Quilling

Sister Consolata

I had a very good friend who used to tell me “What goes around, comes around”, I was never quite sure what he meant but have finally found an example which illustrates this point. As most of you know, anecdotal history tells us that quilling was “invented” by nuns centuries ago. The story as I heard it was that nuns cut off the gilded edges of old manuscripts to decorate religious artifacts. The result looked much like metal filigree. Recently, I was contacted by a nun, Sister Consolata, who asked for a catalogue of our products. I sent her our standard “info pack” which includes our order forms, color chart, samples of some of our specialty papers, and an informational letter which includes information about the quilling guilds (here in the USA and in England) and information about some of the online quilling groups. Several weeks later, I received a lovely typewritten letter from her; I would like to share some of it with you.

“Dear Miss Caputo,
While going over the material that was sent to me by Whimsiquills some time ago, I came across you very kind letter which was included with the material. I am very sorry that I somehow overlooked your letter when I first opened the envelope. Today, I determined to write to you.

I am a 94 year old Notre Dame Sister, and I have done quilling for about eight years. At one time I had some gift tags which were being sold in a shop here in Omaha. A dear lady was interested in them and obtained my address. Her name is Jan. She wrote to me and asked if I gave lessons on this craft. I wrote back and told her that I did not give lessons, but would teach her what I knew about quilling. I learned by using two books that a dear friend had given me.

So this lovely Jan came out to our convent and we became good friends. Jan far surpassed me in quilling. I told her “because of her nurse’s fingers,” you have become and expert in this craft. We had so many interesting times together and Jan gave me many materials to help me in my work. I am very sorry to tell you that lately Jan sent me, through a friend, much of her quilling paper. She has been very ill and cannot do any quilling.

However, I now have a little boy of Omaha, who is my new pupil. His grandparents, when touring our building, noticed me working on a quilled picture down in my art work room. They told me about their eleven year old grandson who is very talented in art and music. When they left our convent, these good people stopped at a craft store and purchased a book and some quilling tools. The next week, this dear grandmother brought young Spencer to me in order to learn about quilling. He is such a dear lad and I know he will do some beautiful work. In fact, I just learned that his teacher wants him to teach her to quill!!”

Her letter went on to tell me a little more about herself, she is a former teacher, and she “still make(s) many gift tags which sell well. I do tire easily so I cannot work as fast as I once did . . . but I want to keep on quilling as long as the Good Lord gives me the strength and ability to do so.” What a delight! Oh yes, she said in her letter that “I am the only nun in the community who does quilling . . .so far.

Quilled Card Making Techniques Continued

Quilled Card Making Techniques Continued

I’ve toyed with the idea of trying some other techniques with my quilled cards. The first technique I tried was paper pricking (piercing). That’s when you prick out a design on the card with a pin (or a special pricking tool). The design can be pierced from the front or the back of the card or a combination of both. It’s really quite pretty and combines well with quilling especially if you use the pierced design as a border. I felt it was way too time consuming to use on a card; I used the technique to make some very pretty background piercing on handmade paper (which I bought, I did not make it). Then I quilled bouquets of flowers which I put on the background and framed. I have since discovered (well I didn’t really discover it, but I found out about it) a tool called the pounce wheel. This wonderful little gizmo will do a pricked border in a jiffy! You can’t use it for everything, although I did do a very nice scalloped border, but I use it to give a pricked edge on some of the papers I use for my cards.

I also bought a book on parchment craft . . . and parchment . . . and tools. However after sitting down and looking at the book, I decided I was not ready for parchment. It seemed very involved and rather complicated. What I have found though, is a book called The All New Compendium of Cardmaking Techniques by Search Press. It came up when I was doing a search for new quilling books. It has a 27 page section on quilling; the designs are some of the ones found in Diane Crane’s Quilled Greeting Cards. What it does have is very basic information for a number of other techniques. “Thread Cards” their term for paper embroidery is just one of them. While I might not want to make a whole thread card, that might be an interesting technique to use for the vase of quilled flowers. I always have to think about what design to use for a vase; making a “threaded vase” might give a whole different look and texture to a piece. It would be pretty small if I were making it for a card but might look pretty neat in a framed piece as well. Hmm . . . There is a section on watercolor cards, which I almost skipped right over . . . I don’t enjoy painting anything, furniture, walls, NOTHING! But . . . there is an interesting section on creating a wash for a background and getting some really neat looks using spattering and salt, of all things! The “Quick Parchment Cards” section has made me rethink the whole parchment thing, especially when I saw some of the border designs and saw it used on color cards. When I got to the silk flower section, I just substituted quilled flowers in my mind. The section on beaded cards combined paper pricking and lace. I am not trying to read the whole book to you but it does have some good basic information so if you are interested in trying any of these techniques, I think it is a pretty good starting point. I have a whole bunch of small quilled pieces that I had made for the 2009 Accord calendar and of course that project got scrapped. So I think I will take a look at them again and look through my books and maybe I can really dress them up. I don’t usually send cards out for Halloween, but some of the designs are really cute Halloween designs, so maybe I will just surprise my family with Halloween cards this year.