Now you see it ... now you don't!

Last time I re-stocked on my quilling strips, I was tempted to include some graduated strips in my order. I've never used these before, but I wanted to give them a try. The strips I got are coloured darkest in the centre, gradually fading out to white at either end. This produces quite a gentle colour effect when you roll the strips, much more delicate than the bold solid colours that I normally use.

For this design, I decided to go back to a technique I began using quite a while ago:  mounting quilling on to a photographic background of quilling to achieve a layered effect. The background is a digital image of a quilled motif made using different shapes, printed in grey.  I did not want this to dominate the finished design, so I printed it on to my card at just 50% opacity, before adding my 'real' quilling on top. I think this balances the delicate shades of the graduated strips quite well - in fact, the effect is quite mysterious and almost ghostly!!

I used quite a few different techniques here, too: large, open 'P' coils, a 'royal' wheatear husking, and two pinched vortex coils with open centres - all made using the graduated strips.

I guess that's the most wonderful thing about quilling - there's ALWAYS something new to try!!