The flowering of a new idea!

What do you do with short, left-over sections of quilling strips? I put all mine into a basket, ready for those times when I just need a tiny length of a particular colour, but occasionally I look at the multi-coloured tangle in my basket and decide to try something a little different. Yesterday was one of those occasions, and this brightly coloured flower was the result!

Lately, I've been making 'art deco' style roses out of strips which have been folded rather than rolled, like the one which I featured recently on my latest Valentine card. To make this flower, I took the idea a step further by joining together lots of short lengths of different colour strips, some crimped and some not. Having created a single multi-coloured strip with these, I first folded it in half and then carried on folding it over and over with my fingers in short (3 - 4mm) sections until I had a flattened type of coil with the original fold at the centre.  I released the coil a little, allowing it to form itself into a softly curved shape before trimming and gluing the ends - and ended up with this multi-coloured bloom!

I quite like its randomness in terms of colour and also its texture, which resulted from alternating flat and crimped sections in the original joined-up strip. I decided that it needed some dark green leaves to offset the bright colours, and made these using crimped strips which I formed into marquises.

I've mounted my flower on to another satin-effect background image which I created using Photoshop Elements, just as I did for the Valentine card.  (There's a link in this post to the tutorial I used - you'll find it the December 2010 edition of Papers and Pixels). I think the dark green swirly background sets off my brightly coloured flower quite well - hope you agree! As you can see, I decided to use this design for a 'Get Well' card.