Quilling not Quilting!

I have been persuaded by friends to reopen my quilling papers and get back to what I really know. Dunno how this is going to work I barely have room to breathe here never mind get tons of paper out. Oh well its all out now and settling quite nicely on the dining room table. Thankfully we can eat in the kitchen!

Ok so for those that don't know much about quilling, it is a very ancient craft, practised by ancient Egyptians and then religious orders used rolled bits of paper/parchment to decorate pictures or relics. It lost its favour until Georgian times when it became a genteel pastime for ladies of quality. There were magazines with patterns in which were very popular at this time. The Bronte sisters quilled and I think in one of their books there is a bit about rolling bits of paper for a purse.

It lost favour again until the 70s, when it became very brown - as most things were in those days!

These days there are lots of quilling groups on Yahoo, and plenty of sites to buy the tools and paper needed.
Below are the basic tools, scissors, rule, fine point tweezers, a cork mat - mine are dinner table mats - covered with wax paper. and a quilling tool.

There are some other tools which you may find useful, the three wooden sticks being different sizes are great for making a bell shaped piece. A crimping tool puts lovely zig-zags in a strip of paper and an embossing tool is useful for moulding punched leaves and petals.

Then of course you need the paper. I mostly use American paper from Lake City Crafts, this is 24inches long and comes in the most amazing colours. English papers are 18" long. Jane Jenkins sells the fabulous colours in what ever width you would like. She does holographic edged papers gilded papers, what ever you want papers...

The box below is my scrap box, some of the bits in here are getting on towards 15 years old, the poppies you can see are at least 10 years old. The colour has not faded, and quilled pieces are very very strong, you can even stand on some of them and they will not move at all.

So that is a quick introduction to quilling, next time we will go onto how to make shapes and what you can do with them.