My second 'secret' quilling!

Here's the other quilling I had been keeping 'under wraps' until after this year's Quilling Guild display of work was over.

It's another little 'sculpture', this time featuring a lily pond with a tree and a base of blue coils which hopefully give the impression of rippling water - well, that was the intention, anyway!

I created this piece a couple of months ago during my active 'vortex coil period' (which regular followers of Quilliance will no doubt remember!!)  I had the idea for the water first, as vortex coils seem to be the perfect medium for this! Then I made the willow tree out of two wide brown iris folding strips joined together along the sides, which I folded and pressed to form a solid vortexed trunk. I decided to decorate it with a few tiny solid dark brown vortexes (?vortices) whose centres have been pushed out and glued into place - these are meant to suggest gnarls on the tree trunk. Then all it needed was a little extra decoration in terms of some ivy and a leafy section at the top. It's meant to be a 'pollarded' willow, by the way, which you often see close to streams and rivers in England. (Pollarding means that that tree has been cut down very low in order to encourage 'bushy' growth.) I spread glue over the vortex coils on the underside of the pond in order to create a solid base.

I entered this into the 'Freestanding Quilling' section of the competition, and here it is in the bottom left hand section of the competition table - now, I did start out by saying it was 'little' didn't I?!!

Anyway, no prizes here, but I did learn a lot about vortex coils in the process of making it - and I was actually quite pleased with my water lily flower: