The new shop isn’t finished, yet, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking of projects. (I didn’t realized how much I missed the ability to just play around in the shop until there was no shop to play around in!) I was on the computer one night, deep in the black hole of time suck that is Youtube, and eating a piece of candy. As I watched the video, I was absent mindedly rolling the wrapper around in my fingers until it wouldn’t go any tighter, then rolling it the other way to straighten it out. At one point I stopped half way and looked down at the paper. what I saw, was two spirals, going opposite directions. I tore the paper in half and tried to see if I could make another. Eventually, the paper got smaller and smaller, but I had several nearly identical curly-cues. I figured I wasn’t the first one to roll paper into shapes, so I started looking on YouTube.
Turns out, there’s a whole art form of doing this called “quilling”. Who knew? About 75% of the videos I saw were from people I’m guessing were of Indian or middle eastern descent and the other 25% were soccer moms who seemed to be a little too cheery to be doing a craft project. All of them made it look like something even a child could do. The next hour was spent looking at examples of projects others had completed and every tutorial I could find on how to make different patterns. Some of them were extremely intricate, some were three dimensional, but to be honest, it looked pretty easy. I thought “I can do this, how hard can it be, it’s just twisting paper”.
The next day, after a quick trip to Hobby Lobby, I sat at the counter, preparing to attack the tiny strips of card stock I’d bought with the special quilling tool and tiny scissors that came with the set. I figured 15 minutes and I’d be staring at a masterpiece. After a half hour or so, I realized a few things. First, every one of those videos were made by a bunch of damned liars! I figure the hosts must have done 30 takes at each piece, then edited out the 29 failures so they could present the one good attempt with their fake smile, silky voice, and claim of grand master status. Bastards! Second, I realized that even if I was able to luck into something that even approached “success”, there was no real application for making this stuff. Seriously, even a bad bowl can hold stuff, but what can you do with even the best quilled paper? I put the stuff away, quietly swore to myself, and decided to wait for another day to do this again.
A week or so later, I was at Bob’s house as we started making a wide rimmed bowl out of some old maple boards that I had glued together. The initial intent was to dye the wood and try to do some kind of texturing across the rim, then stack layers of dye and hope to make something worth making. Then it hit me, I could incorporate the quilling into a channel, then set the whole thing in epoxy! I brought the bowl home and set about trying to improve my quilling expertise. After a week or so and many failed attempts, mulligans, and do-overs, I finally arrived at something that I thought looked at least passable.
The finished result is below and for a practice piece, I think it actually turned out ok! The glue job on the maple boards wasn’t the best, so there’s a crack in the piece that I had to “fix” and my sandpaper and supplies for polishing resin are all packed away, so don’t look too close at the top finish. Eventually, I’ll put this back on the lathe, work on the crack a little more, smooth out the resin surface and polish it back down to a glass-like flat surface.
Now, I’m already thinking about the next project, to see if I can do something like this on a wig stand or even an entire bowl made from quilled paper and resin. I have GOT to get my shop back up and running!
