I have long desired to play with quilling techniques and use quilled paper designs on handmade cards. I have purchased some of the basic tools over time and for one reason or another I had lost track of them. While perusing one of my local craft stores I saw a small selection of quilling tools and most of them were from Quilled Creations. This was a company I was familiar with because in the past I had purchased their Quilling Design Board and I loved using it.
I didn’t take long for me to decide that this was a craft that I needed to revisit and the Quilled Creations Beginner Kit ended up in my hands. Now as a working business owner, I could not just sit and play and that kit waited for me for a bit, but while it waited I just kept accumulating more tools and soon I had a collection.
In this unboxing video I will show you the tools I have collected and give a brief overview of how to use them. There will be plenty of follow up videos to show how to make basic shapes and then advanced designs. Ultimately I hope to provide a comprehensive set of videos to give you a one-stop-shop full of ideas and projects on the subject of quilling.
The tools I have gathered are extensive, but in the video I do not show a fringer or a quilling coach, and I have even begun designing an SVG file to see if I could use the Cricut to cut regular strips of all sizes and also the fancy strips for petaled flowers and the swirled flower designs as well. I will keep you posted on my progress with that Quilling SVG file.
Quilling can be used to create card decorations, wall art, jewelry and miniatures. Customizing and creating artistic names is also very popular.
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Winding thread onto bobbins and finding an easy storage solution for them became a necessary task when I got a new sewing machine that also had an embroidery function. The sewing machine I use is not overly expensive, but for the small purchase price (under $400) it is a real work horse. I have the Brother SE400 Sewing and Embroidery Machine. I can use it to sew a variety of projects on a wide range of materials, and even more fun, I can use the Embroidery functions to create beautiful custom embroidery designs. For the beginner it does simple work like adding a name or initials to personalize an item without much effort. I look forward to showing off several sewing tips and techniques through the Craft Curiosity on YouTube channel.
Because this machine has an embroidery feature, I purchased a beautiful set of embroidery threads in 64 colors. When you embroider with these colors it is typical to use a bobbin thread in white or black for the back of the work. In that instance, you would not need to wind the colored threads onto bobbins.
I found that the thread quality worked for many of my sewing projects and because I was using these colors for sewing I wanted to wind the bobbins with the matching thread. With such a range of colors it can be daunting to keep track of your threads if you store the bobbin separately, my desire was to store the thread spools and bobbins together. I purchased several bobbins and created a "pin" to pop into the top through both the spool and the bobbin to rest the bobbin on top of the spool. After considering many materials, I settled on bamboo skewers and wooden beads. I just found the right size beads so that it would be large enough to not fall through the spool or bobbin opening and also have a large enough hole that a bamboo skewer would fit snugly into that hole. I added a touch of wood glue to give this a bit of strength and keep everything together and quickly made a large supply of wood pins.
Last, but not least, I planned to store all of these bobbin and spool combos in a drawer and I did not want loose thread messing up the drawer and tangling with each other, so I put a small slit on the bottom edge of each spool, and I wrapped each bobbin with a ¼” cut of clear vinyl tubing by slicing several pieces of the tubing and making one cut to open the slice up. The vinyl tubing has just enough memory to stay wrapped around the bobbin thread and hold the loose end of the thread neatly.
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Every year for Christmas I host a “Family Baking Day” where I make dozens of sugar cookies and prepare colorful tubes of royal icing and we have a great deal of fun creating beautiful Christmas Sugar Cookies. I have had a bit of practice working with sugar cookie dough and royal icing and I have had my failures and my successes, so this puts me in a pretty good position to direct my family members in making their cookie designs.
Our family baking day is a two-part day. First I ask each person (or family group) to bring prepared, but not yet baked, cookie dough. This way no one is mixing dough during our party. I pull out all of the baking sheets and set up a loading, cooling and finished cookie station in the kitchen. Second, I set up a large table with my baked sugar cookie cutouts, bags of icing and as many colorful sprinkles and toppings as I can round up and I create a creative “arts and crafts with cookies” area.
It used to be just the ladies, and we would send the guys to the other room to watch football, but slowly they would start creeping in and now they are equally involved and there’s no game on the television. We just put “Elf” in the DVD player and set it on repeat. How is it that we don’t get tired of that movie?!?
I have some very talented family members who jump right in and create beautiful cookies and I have others who as less artistically inclined. With simple guidelines, my non-baking and non-decorating family members have created some beautiful cookies, and I find that having a few tried and true techniques will help ensure their success and create a feeling of accomplishment.
At the end of the day, I served a nice light salad, usually with a rotisserie chicken chunked up and tossed in, to give us a little protein boost and try to counter all of the cookies that we eat.
In this video I will show you just a couple of easy techniques and a few quick tips on how to hold the icing bag and direct the tip.
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