Quick Intro for Quilling

Introduction:
Quilling is an art form where paper strips are rolled, shaped, and glued to make attractive designs. Rolling, shaping, and gluing are the main process involved in quilling. Using this art form, you can make beautiful greeting cards, jewelry, decorative items, miniatures, and so on.

Basic Materials:
The basic materials required are Paper strips, quilling needle tool, and glue. You will get these tools in craft shops.
Paper Strips: You will get ready-made paper strips in different colors. You don’t have to cut papers. For a set of 100 paper strips, it will cost around 40 – 60 Rs depending on the width of the paper strips.
Quilling needle tool: This is the tool used to roll the paper. You can even roll the paper using a pen refill, toothpick, etc. But, needle tools will help you roll the paper tightly and easily and the shapes come out better if you use needle tool. A simple needle tool will cost around 50 Rs. There are needle tools available for 150 Rs also. But, 50 Rs one is more than enough to do quilling.
Glue: Any craft glue is fine. You will get it for 10 Rs.

Procedure:
In quilling, you will roll the paper strips using needle tool and once the entire strip is rolled completely, you must take off the needle tool slowly. The strip starts unrolling now. It won’t unroll completely. At some point, it will stop unrolling. Glue the end at this point. The paper strip looks somewhat like this. 

Now, you can pinch this coil and bring it to the shape you want. After you have the required number of shapes, you can glue them together to make beautiful designs. The following picture shows the basic shapes of quilling. If you observe quilling designs properly, you will come to know that they are made from these basic shapes.

I hope you got an idea of what quilling is!!

How to Learn:
You don’t have to go to any class for learning quilling. I am learning quilling from Youtube. There are wonderful videos on Youtube. Please watch them know about how to use a needle tool to roll the paper, how to pinch them to bring to the desired shape. Trust me, it is damn easy and the end result will be a beautiful asset which will make you very happy.

Challenge:
Many people are not aware of what quilling is. So, if you go to craft shops, they may not be having the required materials.
If you are from Bangalore, you can visit the shop named “Itsy Bitsy”. I purchased all the items there and the prices I mentioned here are as per that shop. I found that in one another shop, they were selling paper strips for 100 Rs which is much costlier than Itsy Bitsy. So, if you are a Bangalorean, “Itsy Bitsy” is the place for you to get started.

Happy Quilling !!

PS: Quilling is simple, but it requires a lot of patience. But, you feel worth having so much patience once the design is complete. 

If interested, have a look at the collection of quillings done by me here.