Fine-tuning my new quilled flower

You remember that I was working on developing a new type of multi-coloured, multi-textured quilled flower design (see my earlier post)? Well, I've refined the idea to make it a little more structured and less random in terms of the colour distribution - and here's the latest version:

I wanted the flower to have a clearly defined yellow/orange centre, encircled by a red and purple 'petals' section. So this time, rather than simply constructing a single composite strip consisting of randomly-selected colours, I planned the colours in advance.

Here's what my initial construction looked like. I started with quarter-length strips (three in all, two yellow and one orange) joined together at one end, so that the orange section is sandwiched between the two yellow ones. The orange strip is crimped for a textured effect. Then I attached a red half-length strip to one of the yellow strips, and a purple half-length strip to the other. The purple strip is also crimped.

Next I loosely 'fold-rolled' the composite strip like this, starting from the yellow/orange end, making sure that the un-crimped red section ended up on the outside.

When I released the resulting coil, it sprang into a square-ish shape with gently curved sides, which could easily be pushed into the desired flower shape.  I trimmed the purple a little so that it lay beneath the red before securing ends of the coil with glue.

For this card, I printed a deep blue background and glued on a scalloped shape punched from gold paper  on which to mount the flower. I played around making a few leaves with two shades of green and a leaf punch - this is a fantasy flower, after all!

Anyway, here's a close-up of the end result:

I think next time I'll use longer strips for the petals section, to make this part of the flower wider - but it's a start! Hope you like it ...