How to Make 2 Quilling Paper Feathers | Quilling for Beginners

Hi folks, this is Meridith from The Papery Craftery and today I'm going to be showing how to make two different versions of filling paper feathers. I have two templates you can find on my website. There's going to be a link in the description box. The first we're going to be making today is a skinnier version and then I have a wider version of a feather as well. As far as supplies go, I'm going to be showing the skinnier feather first And I'm going to be using my wider 3-8 inch filling paper. If you'd like you can use a skinnier strip. The white here is going to be for the shaft in the center and then for the rest of the feather I'm going to be using some purple, some lilac, and some ivory colored paper. I'll go over the other feather when we get to that point. We're going to be using the template underneath a piece of parchment paper on our cork board. You can emboss your template as well if you'd like to, but we're going to be using this method today. We're going to be using some pins to keep everything together. Whatever filling tool you prefer, some tweezers, some small scissors. You might want to grab a small paintbrush as well if you have it. And for glue, I'm going to be using my Elmer's glue all in my needle nose pin cleaner. The first thing we're going to be doing is using one of these strips of the white filling paper, about 18 inches long. I'm going to fold it in half and apply some glue all over one half of my strip. If you've followed me before you've known I do this a lot for the stems of my flowers or I use it when I'm doing on edge work. If you have a heavier weight filling paper, more like a cardstock, you won't need to do this. You can just use the paper as is. But as opposed to buying a bunch of different weights, this is just how I get around not having a ton of different types of filling paper in my stash. So I just use what I have and this works really well to make a nice sturdier strip. Once I get my glue all the way on one half of my paper, I'm just going to run it through my fingers to make sure there's no air bubbles and everything's all smooth. And make sure that the edges are straight. They don't go crooked on each other here. I'm going to let this dry so it stays nice and flat. And like I mentioned before, this is going to be the shaft of the feathers. This is going to be right down the center. I actually made a couple of strips here because we're going to be using it for the little fluff that comes on the bottom of our shaft as well. Let's get a little tighter here. This is the part we're going to be using for the white. I'm going to be making one long piece. That's the main part and then we're going to be making that other half as well towards the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and use my needle tool here just to soften up this strip a little bit. It's going to make that easier to get the exact shape that I want. It's still going to be strong, but it's just going to soften up that glue a little bit. You can also use your hands if you'd like. Finish the matter of sort of molding it so that I can find the size that I want. It doesn't have to be exact. I'm also going to use my needle tool again just to make sure I get that right curve. See how it's sort of an S shape. And then once I get the general shape that I'm looking for, I'm just going to do a couple of dots of glue right on top of my parchment paper down the line where I want my first piece of my strip to be for this shaft. Notice I have the parchment paper on top of the template. We are not gluing the quilling paper to the template. We are going to be removing this later on. I've done this before in videos. I will show this later. At the end of the video, once the feather is done, how to remove it from your parchment paper so that you can mount it on a different surface. This parchment and this template and this cork board is not going to be my final surface. I haven't done it this way in a while. I've been using more of an embossed method and quilling right on my final surface in videos lately, so I thought it'd be good to go back and show this this way as well. So I'm using pins to make sure that my strip stays where I want it and then I'm going to snip off the excess of the first part of that stop. I also like to make sure that I push my strip down to make sure that it's nice and flat against the surface. Sometimes your quilling paper will start to dry at an angle. You don't want that. You want it to be nice and level so everything is on the same surface towards the end. Now we're going to use a little bit more of that white to make that wider part of the shaft at the bottom and measure it with your eyes. It doesn't have to be perfect. Nobody's going to be judging the exact replica of this feather template, so do your best. A little bit more blue along the line so it stays where I want it and pin into place. I know sometimes people don't agree with using pins in quilling. Again, you can pin right through this template because you're not going to be using that template in your final design. It's just so that you can follow the shape. So don't worry about that. You're not putting pins through any of your quilling paper. You're putting it next to your quilling paper so that it holds it up, holds it in place, etc. The last piece of the shaft here is a little tiny piece at the end. Just sort of measure that, cut that, a little bit of glue on either side and then using tweezers we're just going to set that in place. You could also, if you want to, make one continuous strip down the long end of the shaft, make a bend, make this little piece on the bottom, make a bend, and then go back up the other side if you want to. I think this way is a little bit easier, a little bit faster. That's just for me. I'm going to let that all set and then we're going to make the little curly Q there you can see at the bottom, and there's a couple other little pieces coming off the bottom of that shaft there. I'm going to be using the same white. Feel free to change out the colors for this. This is all your choice. Let's see, how about that big? Or that little piece on the bottom. If you've ever seen a feather, they have sort of little downy, very fluffy bits towards the bottom of the feather. That's that little piece that we just tore there. And then I have a piece that's about an inch and a half long. I'm just going to make a quick coil with that. Notice my ends here are torn. Those torn edges are going to make it so that your pieces can glue a little bit more seamlessly on that shaft. So there's not going to be kind of a blunt edge to these little bits that I'm gluing on. It's just going to sort of flow a little bit more together. A little bit more, like I said, a little bit more seamlessly. There's those two and then on the other side of the template there is three more of those little downy bits. Three more of those. We're going to do that in the same way. So all of the white is now dry. I've taken the pins out because everything's in the same place. We're going to start filling in the rest of the feather. I'm going to be using pretty traditional filling paper shapes for this. The entire piece is going to be made up of about 99% curved marquee. And I'm starting with the purple here. I'm going to start off darker towards the bottom and it's going to get a little bit lighter as it goes through the feather. And the pieces are going to start off on the smaller side at 9 inches and gradually get a little bit larger as we get through our feather. I'll show you what I mean in a moment here. But I took a 9 inch strip of that same 3 8 inch wide filling paper. This is from Quilt Creations. I'll leave links in the description box for all of the papers I'm using today. I made a coil on my needle tool. Let it open up a little bit and pinched both ends. That's going to give me a marquee shape. A little bit of glue here to keep it together. And then once that is glued, I'm going to take it between my fingers and my thumbs and push up on one side, push down on the other. And that's going to give me that curved marquee shape. You can fiddle around with these a little bit as you go, but you want it to end up looking like the letter X. There you go. Do the same on either side. And we're going to be using those curved marquee right down in the place where the shaft of our feather meets the little downy bit. It's going to sit right in there very nicely. You can add a little bit of glue to get that set. You really just need a little bit on the edges here of the bottom. And if you need tweezers, feel free. I'm going to set right in there. It is okay if your pieces are a little bit larger or a little bit smaller than the template. And you're going to be making a bunch of these. They're going to get a little bit larger as you go along the feather. So I started off with 9 inches and then the next layer is about 12 inches. I'm going to get these all in here, and then I'll glue them down in a second. A little bit of glue for that layer. And if yours do look a little bit different than mine, make sure that you're gluing the curved marquee in the same direction. If they look off, it's because they're probably backwards. I know it seems like they would only go in. What difference does it make? But they really do fit in one way, where it's going to look like the pieces of the feather are all flowing in the same direction. Every couple of pieces, for some reason, I go ahead and try to put one in backwards, and I could tell right away, oh, that's not right. It doesn't look like it fits together like a puzzle. If you're putting them all in the right way, it's going to look like it's fitting together like a puzzle. There's another purple. Put that nice and cozy in there. And another, and at this point, they've gone from 12 inches to about 18. You can see that one is definitely a little bit larger there. It's going a little bit outside the template. That is okay. That is going to be just fine. This point is going to be the last of our purple. I'm mentally thinking which direction it needs to go in. I almost put that one in backwards. There we go. Now we're going to be moving on to the lavender, I'm sorry, not lavender, lilac. Very similar. The lilac is pulling paper strips. This is still going to be about the 18-inch long. Get that in there nice and cozy. And I'm going to continue with a few of the lilac pieces until we move on to our last color. For our final color, we're going to be using an ivory paper, and notice that I have an asymmetrical number of that lilac. I have three on one side and two on the other. Totally up to you. That was just a personal choice that I made so it wouldn't look super super matchy-matchy on both sides. I'm still continuing to put in the same shape the same direction, but now the pieces are starting to get a little bit smaller again. So that last one was about a 12-inch long strip as well. And then same thing on this side. And I also have stopped for the final two before we get to the tippy top there, the final two shapes instead of being curved, they're back to just kind of a straight marquee shape again. And they're both going to be pointing more towards the top instead of curved out to the side. And then for our very last piece, I have a 12-inch teardrop. That's just going to sit right on the top and kind of wedge itself in there. Then sort of doesn't have to point straight up. There we go. If you'd like to, you can use pins to push your pieces of quilling in a little bit closer to the shaft like right there. I didn't like how that piece kind of had a gap towards the bottom. I'm just going to use a pin just to get it a little bit closer. If you feel like you need a little bit more glue here and there, by all means, do this however you'd like. Even when you are using pins through your shapes, remember you're not pinning into the quilling paper itself. You're going between the layers. So do not worry about using pins with quilling paper because you're not going to go through the side of the paper itself. You're just going through the layers like I said. I'm going to keep fiddling with this for a second until it gets to be the way I like it. Everything's now dry. Everything is set. And now I'm going to show how you can remove your quilling paper I just run my needle tool right through the bottom. Remember we used very little glue to put this shape on that parchment. Really that just came from the beginning with that white shaft down the middle just to keep it in place. We did not glue any of those marquee shapes to that parchment. So this was very easy to get separated. I like to use my tiny craft scissors just to snip the little bit of glue off the bottom that you might see coming from the sides of the shaft of the feather. That's up to you. You don't have to worry about that if you don't want to. This is a really great project to practice mounting because it's very solid. A lot of the pieces I've done before in this way have a lot more negative space to them. So they're a little bit more delicate. This feather isn't going anywhere. This is solid. Now I'm still using my Elmer's glue all. Just making some dots on the underside of the feather. You do not need a lot of glue for this. It will hold tight and you also want to be careful just using the smallest amount of glue you can on any open bit. So like the bottom of that shaft just needs a tiny bit of glue to keep it in place. And I'm going to be mounting today on a pre-cut 5 by 7 inch piece of white mat board. It's perfect for framing or just propping up for a little bit of home decor. And it's just a matter of pressing down on my feather to keep it in place. I could have measured to make sure this was perfectly even but I chose just to go ahead and do that. Now I'm going to show quickly, I'm not going to do the entire thing, but how you can make a more modern version of a feather as well. This is the other template. I have a color called Burgundy. This is the same 3 eighth inch wide. I did the same process for the shaft down the center and then the downy bits for this template were just some marquee shapes as well. About four inches for those turned into little marquee shapes and attached to the bottom of the shaft. And instead of making really solid dense filling paper shapes for this feather, I'm going to be using a combination of swirls, a couple of little scrolls, and just some more straight bits to keep this really open and airy. Definitely more of a modern style of pulling. And this is just a matter of measuring and snipping and feeling what you think is right. I'm starting off the same color as the shaft. It's color again called Burgundy. These will all be linked in the description box. And once I have what I think is the right shape and size, I'm just going to dip in a little bit of Elmer's blue and get that position along the shaft of my feather. Another bit here, and this time let's do a little scroll. So we're just going to roll most of my strip there and kind of curve the bottom. And get that to fill in maybe right on top here. I'm just sort of following the basic shape of the feather. It is okay if it's not exactly against the line. It's okay also if you want to use pins to keep these pieces in place as well. That is all good. Just a matter of taking some pieces from my strip, rolling them in different ways, maybe trimming them if they feel like they're a little bit too long. This definitely takes a little bit longer than filling it up with pieces like that. Those marquees I showed in the beginning. But it's going to give you a totally different look, definitely more modern. And these pieces are moving around a lot. And they're going to come in handy here, so everything dries where I want it. Working in pretty tight quarters. Sometimes as you're putting other pieces down, you run into I don't even want to take our writing. Anyway, when you're putting down new pieces, you might run into a piece you already had that you like, so don't worry about using pins. That's going to make this a lot easier. Get everybody back to where they were to begin with. Anyway, so we're going to fill in a little bit of both sides of the feather with this same burgundy piece and then we're going to move on to another color. So at this point we have a little bit of the feather covered with the burgundy color paper, and I have switched to a little bit lighter of a red, a crimson. This is called Still From Clothes Creation. I'm doing the same thing. Some sort of gentle swoopy pieces, some swirls, and there's a few shorter bits kind of holding it all together. I'm going to continue down the length of the feather and it's going to get continuously lighter as I go. So I have the crimson, I have some red, then I'm going to move to coral, and then I'm going to move to ivory, and then when it all comes together it's going to look like one that I already have finished. I didn't want to make this video an hour long to show you how to do all this. So this is an entire feather filled in with that same technique. If you want to follow this exactly, by all means take a screenshot or something like that of the finished feather, you do not want to watch me do this for an hour. That would be kind of boring. But this is what you can get the idea of using the same technique, but just getting a little bit lighter as you go down the feather. Then I mounted it the same way that I did the first feather. You do want to be a little bit more careful because like I said, it's not as densely packed as the purple feather, so it might be a little bit trickier to move, but it'll all work out. There you have it, two different versions of filling paper feathers. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, you can find both of these on my website with all the rest of my free template. I will have links to that in the description box along with all of the different colored papers I used and the rest of the supplies. And you'll also find a link to my Buy Me a Coffee page there where you can show a little bit extra support for the channel if you'd like to. It's always greatly appreciated because it definitely helps the channel grow and allows me to make more videos. As always, don't forget to leave your questions in the comments, and I'll answer those as soon as I can. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you can be around for my next video, and I'll see you then. Thanks so much for watching. Bye