Quilled Tree Art

This is my latest art project, and my second attempt at quilling. This was my first attempt. 

I am pretty stoked with this one, I wanted to just use autumn colours and have the quilled teardrops be like falling leaves.

 My Creative Space

Little birdy

The shiny spots you may notice is just the glue drying. That is the suckiest part about quilling. It is freakn hard to get the glue to stick to such a small surface area! I generally use a paintbrush to coat the base of the paper generously then stick it down hard and hope for the best!

In other news...

•  I have dyed my hair, bit of an impulse move, not sure how I feel about it yet, probably when it lightens up in a few washes it will look closer to the 'strawberry blonde' I had envisioned. It does however, make my blue eyes look super bright and awesome.

• I made my very first Mince Chow Mein. YUM!
  This recipe uses only one (large) pot! Easy!! Plus you can extend it out with beans/lentils and it makes about six dinner-sized portions.
  
  Mince Chow Mein Recipe

• The latest set of Love Bombs have been sent! Check out Sophie Slim's blog for all the latest.

• We finally met our neighbours! (After 1 year...oops). One we met while Dave was out doing some tree hacking pruning and the others we met when their car got stuck in the stupid gutter drains. (Seriously- they don't make the driveway planks wide enough)
  *tip - use a car jack to jack the car up so its wheel is off the ground and slide a sturdy wooden plank under to use as a ramp. Lower the car then drive on out!
  
  Anyway, the neighbours are lovely, I might have to do a baking mission sometime. 

Enjoy the rest of the week!

Quilling

I am a lover of Pinterest - the site where you can get inspiration for anything. I recently stumbled on this cool blog The Sweet Spot who gives a tutorial on my latest crafty escapade.

Quilling.
The art of rolling strips of paper into shapes and turning it into a masterpiece (well that is my definition). It has been around for years and is mostly used for card making or scrapbooking. But I like it as a work of art in itself.

My strips of paper, my swirly collection and my skewer

I went out and bought some coloured paper and started cutting it into strips. I dug out a kebab skewer to use as my 'roller' and used tape to join ends together. I started doing the shapes in the tutorial but got bored and decided to make my own work of art.

I started with the two large swirls that make the heart shape - there are 3 strips of paper in each one to give a bit of interest -  then made heaps of teardrops in different colours. To glue them onto the canvas I used PVA glue which I brushed on with a paintbrush.

The side view. Ignore the tape strips, next time I will glue them

The next thing I attempted was slightly more abstract. A bird. Based on a swallow painting I did a while ago I followed the basic structure with swirls and teardrops. I started with just red strips and added the yellow afterward.

Haha later on at night I added the yellow, thats why the lighting changed

The canvases I have are quite small so the next quilling project I do I want to be on a bigger canvas and I want to use blues, greens and purples.

This is a project that takes a lot more time than you think. It is definitely something to chip away at but I love the end result so the time is worth it.

One day I will do a revealio of my next quilling project but don't expect it to be for a while, other things have grabbed my crafty attention.

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