Shaping

Loose Roll

Circle: Easy to make, it’s just the basic strip rolled up and glued!

Teardrop: Support the central coil with a fingertip, and find the point where the strip is glued to the body of the roll. When you find it, take your thumb and index finger of the hand not supporting the coil, and pinch the sides, making the glued edge the point of the pinch. This will kink the loops of the coil and create a teardrop shape. It’s not essential to make the glued bit the tip of the point, but it can help to keep the sides looking smoother as the tiny ‘bump’ of the glue won’t show as much. The teardop can also be twisted into a more curved shape, like a half of a yin-yang shape.

Diamond/Eye: From the teardrop shape, pinch the end opposite the tip, making a shape with two pointed ends.

Square: From a diamond, pinch two points in the smooth sides, in the same way as making the diamond shape originally. This should give a shape with the four points roughly equal in distance from each other…

Rectangle: Follow the same instructions as for the square, but make the pinches at a different spacing.

These are some of the main shapes. You’ll find that you’ll start needing other shapes eventually, but they can be easily adapted from these basics.

Making A Picture
Most things can be made through quilling, you just need to be able to ‘visualise’ the shapes that things are made up out of, e.g. circles, teardrops, squares etc. A simple piece to make using these shapes is a duckling.

So, there you go, a quick run-through of the basics of quilling. I hope you decide to have a go, it’s very easy to pick up, and there’s so many ways to develop and experiment with those simple little strips of paper!

Getting started

All quilling pictures are made from a few basic shapes, all very simple to make one you’ve got the hang of rolling the paper, so we’ll start with rolling, gluing, and go on to shaping.

Rolling

To do without a tool: select a strip of paper, any length, but preferably 3mm to start off with as it’s slightly easier to control than 1.5mm or 6mm. I scrape the end of the paper with my nail to start it curling a little bit, then squish (technical term there, eh?) the end into the tiniest fold I can, and roll it up my index finger. To explain the ‘rolling up my index finger’ bit: you know the motion of rubbing your thumb over your index finger to indicate cash, Harry Enfield Loads-a-money style? Run the pad of your thumb up the side of your index with the paper between them, and this should make the paper curl up as it moves to the top. When you roll it to the middle knuckle of your index finger, grab it with the tweezers around the outside edge of the roll. This will keep it secure until you can put it back between your thumb and forefinger and keep on rolling it up again. It’s also why I don’t like the ridged grip tweezers: when you hold it at this point they can crumple the paper edges.

Roll until you come to the end of the strip.

To do with a tool: put the end of your strip into the slot on the tool (apparently dampening the end can make it more likely to stay in the slot) and roll!

Once you’ve figured out what I mean in the instructions above you’ll find you have a tightly rolled circle of paper (unless it slipped when you were rolling, which means you’ll have an open circle, which is fine!). This is a tight roll (also called a grape roll) and it can be glued at this point and used as the basis for 3D designs.

If you let go of this tight roll, it’ll unwind itself and gradually relax into its uncoiled size. If you glue this, it’s a loose roll. So, now you need to know how to glue it!

Loose Roll

Tight Roll

Gluing

If you rip the very end of your strip, the feathery edges of the paper will glue almost invisibly onto the body of the roll, so rip it!

Holding the loose roll in your hand, wipe the end of the strip against the glue nozzle or dip the end that’s not going to be the outer side of the roll in some glue, and wipe the excess off. Any excess glue will show up as a shine on the finished item, so try and minimise the amount of glue you use, so there's less chance of it squeezing out onto an outer surface and being visible.

If you feel the circle has unrolled too much pull the loose end of the strip to tighten it up, and press the glued side of the strip against the body of the roll, using the tweezers to get in between the coils and press the end down tightly without kinking the circle. This should give you a circular shape, with the unrolled coils looping in the centre into a tiny curl.

To glue the tight roll, just don’t let go of it to let it unroll, and glue the end against the tightly rolled body. From the basic circle in its loose and tight forms we make all the other shapes.

An introduction to quilling

Ok, so you want to quill, huh?

I don't blame you! As a hobby, it's cheap, easy and once you get the hang of it, you can make some impressive looking pieces! Well, you're going to need a few things to start off with:

Tools

• Fingers. Very useful items for this craft, although if you want to show off and you're very agile, toes would do at a push.
• Strips of paper of varying widths. The standard width in the UK is 3mm (one eighth of an inch in the USA / some other countries) for most stuff, 1.5mm for fine narrow work, and 6mm, 9mm, or even 12mm for folded roses and fringed flowers.
• PVA glue. Only the child friendly stuff for you lot, just to be safe. It's best to decant it into a fine nozzle glue dispenser, such as the Art Institute or other brands.
• Nails. Or the back of a knife. Or anything you can use to scrape paper to start it curling.
• Tweezers! Not the eyebrow ones (although they'll do at a pinch), really you need ones that come to a narrow point, as fine as possible. I got fancy-schmancy medical tweezers, but any fine point tweezers without gripping ridges (that would crumple the paper) will do.
• Some small, sharp scissors. Cuticle scissors are good, they're very helpful for trimming strip ends, fringing flowers etc.
• Some sort of flat surface to work on. Depending on whether you want to copy exactly a diagram, or design freehand (easier and less terrifying than it sounds, honest!) you'll need either a cork or porous board (anything that you can stick pins into that'll stay in place) and some greaseproof/tracing paper. The board lets you stick pins in to hold the quilled bits in place as they're gluing to each other, and the greaseproof paper is for putting a pattern beneath that you then lay out on top of the paper to make the shapes to match it. This type of board is best of you're copying a design.
• A flat surface, preferably plastic/smooth. I make my stuff freehand, and glue it together on a flat surface. Usually a bit of extra glue seeps out from the join between the pieces and ends up on the back, so I need a smooth plastic surface to be sure I’ll be able to detach it when the glue’s dried! Mainly, I use a plastic tray – now heavily glue covered!

Optional bit and bobs:

• A quilling tool. But I don’t recommend it you know! Using one of these do-hickeys means that the centres or your rolls are gonna be big and bulky, rather than neat and inconspicuous. It’s worth the effort (and occasional swear words) of learning to roll without them.
• A paper shredder. Handy if you want to make your own unusual paper strips. Make sure it tells you on the box the width of the strips though: you want 3mm. Also, paper can slant as it’s going in, so you get short diagonal strips instead of long straight ones.They can also fray the edges of the paper, leaving them looking 'furry'.
• A cocktail stick. For neat people (not me!). You can use this to transfer glue to the ends of your strips once rolled, but that’s why I like fine nozzle glue dispensers - you can wipe the strip directly against the glue nozzle!

Right, got that all together? Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.