Rainbow coloured mandala

At last I completed my rainbow coloured mandala yesterday. My first ever. So far, only one is done. I have to make at least 5  or more of this. Hope I won't get tired making so many of them.

I had a hard time deciding what quilling shapes and sizes I would choose to surround the rainbow shell shape petals. After a lot of trials and errors, this is what I came up with. The mandala itself is quite small and simple. I made it look a little fancy by adorning it with all those bling blings. 

After this, the next step is to put this mandala on my handmade cards. I think it would be great card for any occasion. Although making a quilling mandala means that you would have to make similar quilling shapes repeatedly, I'm surprised that I enjoyed it. It can be rather therapeutic! Indeed!

The only challenging thing about making this quilling mandala was making those rainbow shell shape petals. Which by the way, takes so long to make! Yikes! Other than that, it was easy peasy making those basic quilling shapes. It's been a long time since I made those marquise and tear drop shapes. Can be a little nostalgic! Just thinking back on how many of those shapes I made way back when I first started quilling. I must have made thousands of them!

For all the quilling shapes in this mandala, I only used 5mm quilling strips. And they are all hand cut with razor and metal ruler. I'm beginning to enjoy using the 5mm quilling strips. All these years of quilling, 8 years in total, not once I tried the 5mm quilling strips. I've only been using the 3mm ones. And they are mostly shredded papers. But now, anything goes! It's all about experimenting and going to the next level. ;)

Rainbow shell shape quilling petals

Just the other day, I thought that I could only use maximum four colours using the shell shape quilling method  But yesterday I realised that I could use more than that! I was just playing with the thought of using rainbow colours and tried it out first with my shredded papers to see if it could work. To my surprise, it did work although it was very time consuming and difficult to handle.

The shredded papers were a lot more difficult to handle because they are very small. They are 3mm wide and it seems that it's easier to use the 5mm quilling papers than the 3mm ones because when you've finished combing all the coloured papers, it's difficult to push the 3mm papers with the tweezers. So, I used the 5mm quilling papers instead. 

I really love how the petals turned out looking like heart shapes instead of shell shape. Especially the red and orange papers inside each petal. They really stand out. 

At first I did want to make flowers arrangement with the petals but I decided to make a mandala instead. I've never made one before. This is my first time trying so please excuse me if I am not doing it right. I'm just having fun with it. I've seen a lot of samples out there where people use quilling to make them. It's seems so much fun arranging the quilling shapes in a circle like that. 

As you can see from the photo above, I am in the process to make the mandala to decorate on my handmade cards. Just a small one. Nothing too complicated. Hope to make a few of them soon! ;)

Four colours shell shape quilling flower

I made this flower a few days ago. Uploaded photos of them and a short video of it on Instagram first because I just couldn't wait to share them with everyone, as usual, hahaha. I need to learn to be more patient I guess and blog about it here first before sharing it anywhere else.

I was kinda obsessed with making those shell shapes petals over and over again. Then it occurred to me that I should try using more than 2 colours per petal and see how it would turn out. To be honest I think 4 colours is the limit for me! More than that, it would be so difficult for me to hold on to the petals without messing with it's shape.

The plastic lice comb is the most suitable comb to be used for me to make this 4 colours shell shape quilling flower. This is because the tooth of the comb is very small and thin. Thus giving more room to comb more layers of quilling paper. The bigger the tooth and larger gaps in between would make it harder to add a lot of layers. It's hard to explain, I guess you have to try it yourself to understand what I'm trying to say.

So far, I've only tried using these colours like soft pink, cyber pink, fluorescent pink and red. The combination is great! I would love to try more other colour combinations in future and show them to everyone here. Till then! ;)

My version of the Shell Shape quilling flower - Tutorial

Well hello again! 

Another quilling tutorial post today for you guys. I guess I've been doing a lot quilling tutorials lately. It's all because I've been getting so many requests from my followers on Instagram to make them, I just can't say no. I'm in the mood for it anyways. I just feel like quilling and quilling and quilling. Looks like my absence from quilling for so many months has led to this! 

Ok! Back to the subject! The Shell Shape quilling flower! It's a quilling flower made using a quilling comb. I learned how to make it from a quilling tutorial made by Toshi M last July. You can view her quilling tutorial on her YouTube channel at the link HERE. I wasn't really sure about how to make it in the beginning because I didn't know the length of the quilling paper that she used to make each petal of the flower. So I experimented a lot in order to make it exactly like she did it. In the end, I still couldn't make it look exactly like hers because I think our quilling papers are different. So it turned differently. Similar, but not exactly the same.

Once I figured out how to make her Shell Shape quilling flower, I wanted to give it a try with a different type of quilling comb. So I used a lice comb! I got it many years ago back in 2012 when I first learned how to do the quilling comb technique. You could see my blog post about it at the link HERE. I experimented a lot with different types of combs back then. It was kinda like an obsession. The more combs, the merrier. Haha!

Anyways, when I tried to make the Shell Shape quilling flower with the lice comb, I was shocked to see how it turned out. It looked like the shape of a heart instead of a shell. Well, that's my personal opinion la! Haha! It seems that, the smaller the pins of the comb and the smaller the gap in between it, makes all the difference. So that's the trick! That's what makes them different. I figured, the best way to make people understand how it's done is by making a tutorial. Because just showing what type of comb I used is not enough. You have to see how it's done in order to understand. A lot of people have been bugging me to do this tutorial, so I hope you guys find it helpful and share it with those who love quilling too.

I used a 80gsm colour printing paper for this flower which I cut myself by hand with razor and ruler. The size of each strip is 5mm x 297mm. So for one petal, I combined two different colour quilling papers. I used the same amount of paper to make Toshi M's quilling flower. So in other words, you can use the same measurements and yet different results all because of the quilling comb. The quilling comb is the reason why they look different.

So do check out the quilling tutorial below and give it a try yourself. Hope you will enjoy trying it out. Have fun quilling! :)