Easter is coming soon, and this year it is celebrated from Good Friday on March 30th, until Easter Monday on April 2nd - making Easter Sunday fall on April Fool's day. For this occasion, I would like to show you my new quilled Easter egg - a Northern Hawk Owl.
This year's last Easter egg is a birdcage. It is delicate, airy, intricate, and at the same time easy to make. This egg may look simple compared to the Emperor penguin or the super-complex egg with a surprise, but I like it no less than the others.
On an Easter note, I would like to show another quilled egg I made recently. This is an emperor penguin. Emperor penguins are the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species and are endemic to Antarctica. In my opinion they are the most beautiful, too. Males and females are similar in plumage and size, so my penguin may be either a mom or a dad, whichever you like better :) And there's a surprise, too.
November is a good time to start thinking Christmas. I'm living in Canada now, and my neighbors have already decorated their houses. I thought it would be nice to showcase some Christmas ornaments with quilling today.
Dear readers! First off, I would like to thank you for all those emails of appreciation and encouragement I receive from you, as well as your comments on this blog. I read them all, without exception. And I value them a lot! Unfortunately, I not always have time to reply, so I want to apologize, too.
Now it's time to keep my promise (see Thermometers decorated with quilling) and show you two other thermometers.
This post is about this year's costumes I prepared for my girls. I know, it's too late for Purim and too early for Halloween, but I decided to show them now anyway. My elder daughter wanted to dress up as an owl, and I thought of the idea of a quilled mask right away. The mask is built on a cardboard base. First, I made the inner rim of the eyes using yellow and black strips 1/8 inches wide (about 3 mm). Then I cut wide brown and beige paper strips and used the fringed flowers technique to create the "feathers" around the eyes. When they were ready, I cut the rest of the brown and beige paper into 1/8"-wide strips (3 mm), used them to roll "eye" shapes, and glued the shapes onto the base, at the sides of the mask. The beak is made of plain and corrugated, 1/4"-wide (6 mm) brown strips. A brown skirt and a sweater with simple wings attached to the arms complete the costume.
This flower arrangement in shades of orange was inspired by the flowers of lily, mum (Chrysanthemum), rose, pot marigold (Calendula) and flame vine (Pyrostegia/Bignonia Venusta).
I was writing this post when the news came about the tragedy in Japan. Like many other's, my thoughts, heart and prayers are with the people of Japan. For those looking for ways to donate to support the disaster relief efforts, here are a few links:
Dear readers! First off, I would like to wish you a happy New Year! May the upcoming year be full of joy, good health, peace and creativity. I'd like also to apologize for not blogging, and not responding to emails and comments lately - I've been too busy with my classes.
It's time to wrap up making Rosh Hashanah greeting cards for this year. Seems like I've made enough for all friends and family :) This is the third and final set, the previous two can be found here:
Well, the one at the top isn't too much original. Apples (how to quill apples) with honey are traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah eve. Size: 3 1/8 x 3 1/8 inch (8 x 8 cm).
The owl is one of the most amazing birds in my opinion. I like owls as a subject of my crafts: I made an owl cake, a salted dough owl, owl salt and pepper shakers, and this time also a paper quilling owl.
Along with the traditional, I also enjoy doing three-dimensional quilling very much. Here's my new 3D piece &mdash a penguin. Here's how I made it:
This yellow bird is my new three-dimensional quilled work. When I was skimming through my new book on 3D quilling — Three-Dimensional Quilling: Making Characters
Another birthday cake, one I made long ago. I'm not going to write the recipe, but only how to decorate it. For this owl cake you will need:
One day my elder daughter asked me to make a marionette. That's why this birdie was born. It's made mostly from all kinds of waste — bottles, lids, fabric scraps etc. Well, let's start.
This time we tried a home-made modelling dough. How to make such an owl — on SolNEt.ee (in Russian, but with step-by-step pictures). You can also find lots of modelling dough recipes on the Web, for example here or here. We use the following one:
Mix flour and salt in a bowl, add oil and mix well, then add water and mix thoroughly to form a dough. The dough can be stored in a fridge in an air-tight bag for a couple of weeks.
After shaping the owl we let it dry in the sun for one day, then baked at 80 C (175 F) for two hours and at 150 C (300 F) for 30 minutes. For eyes we used allspice (Jamaica pepper/pimento/newspice).
I would recommend coating your owl with a varnish, but remember not to use water-based varnishes since they dissolve the dough. You can also paint on salt dough models.
Other things we made of the dough: aircraft, snail, hedgehog, snowman etc.
I found the idea of such a birdie on the wonderful Tatyana Dubinsky's blog (in Russian): "Primitive papier-mache". Used a small plastic bottle as a mould, crumpled a paper ball — the head — and attached it, made a triangle cardboard beak. Attached a paper cone at the rear to be used for tail feathers later. Covered with three layers of papier-mache (small pieces of white paper with glue), attached feathers. Finished by painting and gluing wiggly eyes.
This is our recent creation with the "Keramikal" material — owl salt and pepper shakers. I wrote about this material in other posts, for instance in "Hanukkiyah". Here the material is used in its two natural colours. Put a cloth on the surface you're going to work on and let's start.
I created this peacock card with almost solely simple quilling shapes: eyes and teardrops. The tail feathers are made of tricolor strips. As I use hand-colored and hand-cut quilling paper strips, I painted both sides of an A4 size paper in three different colors — green, yellow and blue (in this order). Each color took a third of the sheet. Then I cut my strips. If you have pre-cut quilling papers, just join strips of different colors to get a single strip for each feather. When quilling the teardrops for the feathers, I started rolling from the blue end, so that the blue part went inside, and the green outside. The yellow in between. This gave my quilling a special look, I hope.
As you can see, my quilled peacock has also nice big eyes and elegant V-scrolls on its head. The quilled letters were the difficult part, but I found the inspiration in this alphabet letters pattern.
I found this idea at KinderArt, which is a wonderful resource for craft ideas and activities for kids.
Our penguin is slightly different from the KinderArt's one. We used a plastic bottle and covered it with small pieces of paper and glue (about this technique). You may pour some sand into the bottle for stability. Then we crumpled a paper ball for penguin's head and glued it onto the bottle neck, covered the whole thing with another layer of paper mache. For the beak and tail we rolled up two small paper cones. Then cut out and attached feet and wings. After letting the penguin dry, painted him and glued eyes.
