Last fall while visiting a craft show, my granddaughter drew me into a booth to watch the artist roll paper strips into beautiful shapes, creating unique designs for greeting cards, wall art, jewelry and more. This craft is called quilling and dates back many centuries. You can learn more of the history of paper quilling from the Quilling Guild. Quilling is making a comeback in popularity today and is even used in many advertising campaigns and product packaging designs. A quick search on Pinterest for the word “quilling” will reveal many images from simple to quite intricate designs and you can easily find tutorials to get you started on the simple shapes.

I purchased a kit to get started (the only tool you really NEED is a needle quilling tool!) and played around with making some simple shapes and decorating a couple greeting cards. I watched a Skillshare class and learned how to make my name decorated with quilled shapes. It was a great project to try lots of shapes!

I had so much fun doing this, I prepared card stock pages with each of my grandkids names outlined and taught them to quill. They all had a great time decorating their names.

The purpose of this post is not to teach you how to quill since there are already many resources available to show you how. So often when I learn to do something, I want to know what else I can do with that skill. How can I tie this skill into something else I like to do? I decided to make quilling stamps to try with gelatin plate printing.

Using 1/4 inch strips of card stock, I quilled several basic shapes and glued them to small pieces of cardboard.

On the top side of the cardboard I used tape to make handles for my stamps.

Now it was time to try the stamps out on my gelatin plate. I use a homemade gelatin plate (recipe and instructions).

I made this plate five years ago and am still using the same plate. After each printing session, I rinse the paint off, melt the gelatin plate in the microwave and reset it in the glass pan. I keep it stored in the pan on a shelf in my craft room and have never had it mold. It has shrunk in depth(probably from all the times of rinsing it off) and I’m needing to make a new batch to add to it. I’ve been very happy with this recipe.

I experimented with deli paper to make the following prints using my quilled stamps to remove paint from the plate before pulling a print. I was not trying to make a picture out of the prints, just trying out the stamps. The papers I printed will work nicely with collage art. Where you see white, there is no paint- just the deli paper. When used in collage anything under the white area of the deli paper will show through.

Have you tried paper quilling? Have you tried gelatin plate printing (monoprinting)? If you’ve done both, try combining them like I did. If you have not tried either craft, what are you waiting for? You are missing out on a lot of fun!