Birds of paradise - quilled, of course!

Well, everyone seemed to love my little parrot/cockatoo - thanks to all of you who kindly visited and left comments. I felt particularly honoured to be featured on Denise Cameron's Facebook Quilling and Paper Art Discussion Board. Also, I'd especially like to welcome Susan and Bronwyn as my latest blog followers. I think it's really great that you want to read about my work, and I shall be following your own blogs with interest, too.

Well, still on a theme of birds, I've had a go at creating some colourful birds of paradise, as you can see here. Instead of my usual photo backgrounds, I thought I'd play around with some of the shapes, lines and colours in my Apple Mac Pages software, and these cards are the result. I think filigree work with open coils is perfect for birds' feathers, and you can let your imagination run riot. I'd like to try doing a peacock next - has anybody got any good patterns?

A little quilled parrot - or is it a cockatoo?

I've just created this little guy, based on a design I used many years ago in my pottery painting days! I had painted him on to the side of a vase, and when I looked at him the other day I realised that it would be easy to re-create the shapes of his body and feathers using teardrop and marquise quilled coils. So this is the result ...

You will never guess what the background pattern is!! Last weekend we were at a railway station, and my husband took a very blurred photograph of a stationary train by accident! (He forgot that his camera was still switched on!!)  When I downloaded his photos, I found this amazingly vibrant image:

The colours are the red, yellow and blue livery of a commuter train, set against the dark background of the station platform at night time. Instead of deleting it, I decided to add it to my collection of photo backgrounds for my cards. There really is beauty to be found in everything!

Quilliance has a new follower! I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Quill Seeker, whose blog I discovered yesterday. Like me, she's blogging about her ongoing craft projects, and it's great to be able to share ideas.

Quilled angel fish card with coral

I've just finished this one for my friend's birthday on Friday:

Quilled sea creatures ... and blossom on my cherry tree!

I thought I would try quilling some sea creatures this week, and here's the first result:

Once again, I've used a section of my trusty rainbow photo background for this card. I cropped into the colours, so that I had yellow as a sandy sea-bed base and blue/green for the water above. I'm thinking of doing an angel fish next, and maybe a mermaid. Watch this space ...

Meanwhile, the blossom on the cherry tree in my garden is at its most beautiful right now, so I took some photos yesterday for use on cards like this one:

Our weather is fantastic at the moment, with brilliant blue skies - BUT the volcano that is currently erupting in Iceland is apparently sending a cloud of ash and dust right over the United Kingdom, many thousands of metres above us. Some days I can smell the sulphur, and sometimes the blue sky has a slightly grey tinge to it - but otherwise you wouldn't know. The weirdest thing is that no planes are flying, so the skies are quiet as well. It's all very strange ...

Anyway, I'm going to carry on making lots more cards this week, because they are selling really well at our local cafe, which is great! I do hope that the customers like my sea creatures, because I can definitely feel an angel fish coming on ...!!

It's Spring ... and time to quill!

I was so pleased with the riot of colours in my spring flowers photo that I just HAD to use it for some new quilled cards:

It's Spring!

Over the rainbow!

The rainbow in my kitchen sink just got even better!! (See my earlier post A perfect rainbow for the background to this!)

A few days ago, we had the most glorious bright sunrise, and the light shining through my kitchen window was amazing. This time I put a CD in the path of the reflection, and got a kaleidoscopic picture of the resulting colours. I've used it as the background for a quilled white butterfly on this card:

Resin paperweight with quilled seaweed and real sea shells

I have just un-moulded the paperweight I have made for my friend who wanted one with sea shells inside - and here it is:

I have used real sea shells collected in the Isles of Scilly, and added a little bit of quilling to represent seaweed in amongst them. These have all been set between two layers of clear casting resin in a dome-shaped mould, using the method described in my earlier Quilled Paperweight post.

I love the way the dome shape creates multiple reflections of the objects set within the resin.

The shells I have used are some of my favourites from numerous beach-combing expeditions on the beautiful beaches of Scilly. I have literally thousands of these shells, mostly displayed in glass vases and jars, plus a collection of really tiny ones that can be used in card-making. And I hope to collect many more next month when I visit the famous Shell Beach on Herm in the Channel Islands - a place I have wanted to go to for many years.

Happy Easter everyone!