Quilled silver star earrings for Christmas

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I have a regular customer at the market who is always asking me to design new quilled earrings for her. (She's the lady who recently bought the poinsettia earrings, and she also regularly wears some little black and white sheep earrings that I made - you may remember me mentioning her before.)

Anyway, her latest commission was for a pair of silver star earrings to wear at Christmas. She wanted me to try and make them by layering two groups of three 'star points', a bit like I did with the poinsettia petals.

Well, I started off just using silver strips to make the groups of three teardrop-shaped star points - but, to be honest, they looked a little dull. So then I decided to coil the silver strips with white strips to give a two-tone effect, and this definitely brightened them up. Having layered the star points in an offset fashion, I finished the design by adding a little stick-on 'jewel' in the centre.

I'm one of those 'purists' who really doesn't like to use a quilling tool because of the kink it leaves in the centre of a coil. I wind my strips around a needle tool instead. But I must admit, I do find winding metallic strips difficult - somehow they just don't seem to want to start rolling, even after dampening the ends. So, for the coils I used in these earrings, I actually attached the silver strips to the white strips about 5mm down from the ends of the white. This had two benefits: first, it was much easier to get the coil started by winding the first part of the white on its own - and second, the resulting coils  had a nice focal point of white in their centres. I would recommend this technique to anyone who shares my difficulty with rolling metallics. Just don't forget to wind the joined strips with the metallic on the outside to get the right colour effect!