May 26 2009
Resizing a Quilling Pattern
It is very easy to change the size of a quilling pattern to fit your specific background — simply use a shorter or longer strip of quilling paper to make your quills. (A “quill” is just a generic name for your scrolls and/or coils.) With some practice, you will discover the size of the paper strip that will give you the size quill you need.
For example, I found the cutest matchbook notepad template from Mirkwood Designs and thought that the floral pattern from ”Quilling a Twinchie — Beginner Pattern” would be perfect on it. After printing out the matchbook template I discovered that the actual space available for the quillwork was only 1″ x 2″ which was too small for the twinchie pattern. To make the quilling design fit the new project I needed to reduce it, so I cut the length of the quilling strips called for in the pattern in half (except for the tight coil used for the flower center — I kept that at 1″ since smaller than that is difficult to work with).
So instead of:(5) 6″ marquise coil, blue
(1) 6″ teardrop coil, blue
(1) 1″ tight coil, white
(1) 7″ V-scroll, green
(1) 4″ V-scroll, green
the quilling pattern used for the matchbook notepad is:
(5) 3″ marquise coil, pink
(1) 3″ teardrop coil, pink
(1) 1″ tight coil, white
(1) 3-1/2″ V-scroll, green
(1) 2″ V-scroll, green
As you can see in the comparison photo, the pink floral on the matchbook is just about half the size of the blue floral twinchie.
Don’t shy away from a quilling pattern just because it isn’t the exact size you need. Now that you know how to adjust the length of the quilling paper strips to make your quills larger or smaller, you can make any quilling design work for you.
Charlotte: Thanks a lot for sharing your ideas and work