Season's Greetings!

Wish you all a very Happy Holiday Season and a Prosperous New Year!
 Here are some cards I made for the holiday season.

Scraps and Ribbon

  

I had some beautiful invitation cards. I wanted to use them in my own card. So, I tried two different variations with some scraps of paper and I used ribbon with them. In my card with the roses, I tried to make the leaves with tweezers but since the paper was slightly thick, I  did not get the result I expected(the veins are not seen very clearly)

 

Double fringed flowers and multi-strip scrolls

I just realized I have been chosen one among the top 3 in the takeaquillpill anniversary challenge for this card! Pretty excited to win my first challenge!

I had seen the double fringed flowers on Inna's site and wanted to use it on one of my cards. Recently I came across Neli's site through Suganthi's blog. Neli's work with multi-strip scrolls are simply beautiful. Her small Christmas cards are so pretty, you cannot help trying to quill those.
When I was trying to put all of these together, I got a request from a little girl who wanted a card with flowers, leaves and a butterfly. That is how the butterfly made its way here.

p.s: I am entering this for the takeaquillpill anniversary Piyu's challenge

Quilled dog

I had to make another b'day card for a boy who loves dogs. He has a Shih tzu which is white with brown spots. So I thought it would be appropriate to quill a dog. I found this wonderful quilled dog online and decided to use it in my card.

Quilled train for a little boy

I had to quill a b'day card for a little boy and I knew I wanted to do something like car, plane, train etc.. When I was looking for ideas, there were some wonderful quilled train pictures on the web. With all due credit to the original designers, I made a humble attempt to come close to them. I am eager to see the child's expression when I give him the card, hope he likes it:)

A flower for a teacher

Here is a simple card I quilled for a wonderful teacher on Teacher's day.
Though I haven't quilled much lately, I have definitely been watching the latest techniques posted out there and trying them out!

Purple Passion

I wanted to try the petals which had one color in the center and another color on the outside. So, I had these light and dark purple strips which I put to use and quilled the petals. I used quite a lot of strips and learnt the role of tension, texture and thickness of the paper.
I had these petals with me from a long time. I saw my friend's blog with a purple flower and decided to enter the Kalalayaa's challenge.

Like my friend has mentioned, I also feel the purple looks more like blue in the picture. The background paper is actually a very beautiful deep purple. Other than the green color used for stems/leaves everything else is a shade of purple.

p.s: Thanks to Paula of Chillin with Quillin for sharing her Stylish Blogger Award with me!

Green Earth!

This has been my favorite projects till date. I landed up with a green Vortex design when I was working on something else. I wanted to use it as a leaf and had not found anything to do with it yet. When I saw Piyu's challenge of quilling with monochromatic colors, I actually started out with just one leaf. Then I realized it is green and with my love for trees, nature and environment it would be great to quill something all green. I really loved doing this since it represents nature in bounty. I completed this card with simple quilling techniques and quite pleased with the result.

Green Earth!

Flowers!

My friend inspired me to start quilling and I was really motivated to try out the new technique after seeing the fabulous card she had made.  As suggested by her, I followed the tutorial, it gives amazing results. Yet again I am so impressed with the results you get from rolling paper in different ways!
I tried making petals with two colors of paper and could not wait to put them together.
I realized that a picture does not do full justice to the true colors.

 

 

Another b'day card !

I seem to be quilling a lot of b'day cards because it is a great occasion to give a handmade card instead of buying one at a store.
Here is a simple one I made for my son's friend. Little boys love rockets, space ships etc., so thought this one would be good.

Birthday card

I came across the challenge on http://takeaquillpill.blogspot.com/ and wanted to quill a cake, Black Forest to be specific. Since Piyu mentioned it was her birthday, everything associated with a birthday came to my mind.. streamers, gifts, balloons, confetti etc.. however, I knew I would not be able to fit all of it in one card.
Then I got this idea to have a separate window for each of these, so that they would not all crowd the space. I have the cake in the middle since it is the focus of the card and captured the spirit of the birthday in the other spaces. The cake itself was quilled with white to dark brown graduated paper and has cherries on top. It took me a long time to decide the background, design and add all the details.

Graduated paper

I found some great pre-cut strips with graduated color. They are absolutely fabulous. I thought the bells will look really great with the paper. So, I started making the bells (or buds) I thought it should be easy to roll a coil and push it out at the center, but only when I started doing it I realized it was quite difficult to do it in a uniform way. Then I made some petals with eccentric coils.
The oval is cut out from handmade paper which has natural petals/leaves in it.
I think the bee ended up a tad bigger than it should be, however the end result looks decent, or so I think. Would love to hear comments/suggestions for improvement on this one.

More tools!

Back to quilling after a long break!
I got myself some more things to make quilling easy. I got a self-healing mat from amazon.com and I got a paper knife and a metal ruler from a local store.
I found a few colors of pre-cut paper, such a joy to quill with pre-cut papers.. you can focus only on rolling and not so much on cutting. However with the paper knife and the self healing mat, cutting becomes lot more easier than with scissors. I can cut the 1/4 in. easily, still trying to get the 1/8 in. perfectly each time.