Make Your Own Circle Sizing Guide for Paper Quilling

One of the very handy tools for paper quilling is a circle sizing guide or template.  With this you can make sure that each of your loose circles is the same size, making your designs more symmetrical, even, and pleasing to the eye (of course sometimes you don’t want everything to look perfect and that can be great too!)

If you are just starting out with quilling you might not have a circle template yet.  If you don’t want to wait until you get to purchase one, don’t fret, you can make your own with a few simple supplies! This is actually how I made my first circle sizing template, which I used for more than 5 years when I was a child before buying one of my own once I was in college and had a little income!

What you need:

• A board – either a thick styrofoam board or a corkboard
• round items of various sizes – buttons and coins work great
• stick pins
• a felt tip pen

Directions:

Choose your round objects as per the size of circles you want to use.  Here I am using two sizes of buttons and three Malaysian coins of various sizes.  You may want to make a row of each size, but you only need one object as you can repeatedly trace it.  Use your felt tip pen to trace each circle. 

Repeat by tracing each object as many times as you would like.  For this tutorial I only did each one once.  When finished, remove your circle objects, you are finished with them!

Now use your straight pins and place four around each of your circles – top, bottom, left, and right.

That’s it, your board is ready to use!  Use longer strips of paper for the larger circles, and shorter for the smaller.

Tips for Success:

• The more dense your board is, the more sturdy your final product will be.  Here I used a semi-dense piece of styrofoam board from some packing material.  It is 1.8cm thick (almost 3/4″) which is pretty thick.  But it won’t last forever.  If you are just using it as a temporary tool that is fine.  But if you want it more permanent, find a thick corkboard as it will last longer.
• It is more tricky to remove your coils from this board because of the heads of the pins.  To make it easier you can glue a circle together while it is on the template.  When dry, remove one or two pins to easily  remove the coil, then simply replace the pins.
• To make sure your circles are all the same size, make sure you place your pins in the same positions on each of the circles of the same size.  For example, always put your pin IN the pen mark, or always put it outside or inside, whichever is your preference.  I found it easiest to place the pins exactly in the outline that I drew.  If you place your pins in the outline on one, and outside the outline on another, then your circles won’t be the same size.

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