Making Paper Quilled Jewelry – Tip #3 – Thickness

Here is another tip for making great looking paper quilled jewelry!  Make sure to check out all of the other tips here.

Today’s tips is regarding the thickness of the open circles and borders that you use for paper quilled jewelry.  An open circle is when you wrap a paper strip around an object.  You can then pinch the open circle into a teardrop, leaf shape, or other shape if you wish.  I use open circles for many of my designs.

Here is one design that I use both open circles and a border for.

To make sure your jewelry is smooth and sturdy, the open circles and borders need to be thick enough.  A larger open circle or border needs to be thicker than a small one.

As one example, one of my designs is a small lattice similar to the above example.  Once a customer asked me for a larger version of the same design.  The first time I made it, I made the circles and border the same thickness as I did when I made the small design.  I found it to be flimsy and not very smooth looking.  I made another one, this time making them with longer papers, and it looked MUCH better!  Here is a photo to show what I mean:

The top two pairs of earrings are of my small lattice design.  The large mauve color is my first attempt at making a large version.  You can see that the thickness seems to be about the same, but it does NOT look as good.  I used longer lengths of paper for the grey one.   The design with the thicker shapes and border keeps its shape MUCH better and looks smooth and sturdy.

Here is a closeup look at the two large lattice designs:

If you are making a design using open circles or borders and it just doesn’t seem to be holding it’s shape well, try again using longer strips of paper so it ends up thicker.  Thicker=smoother=stronger!

If you are interested, check out the tutorial I have for making the small lattice earrings along with several other designs.

Feel free to leave any comments or questions, and stick around to view some more great pages here!

Click here to view free paper quilling tutorials!

Click here to view paper quilling tips and tricks!

Click here to view a list of places to buy quilling supplies around the world!

Click here to view some of my own quilling projects, with tips so you can make your own if you’d like!

*All products and supplies in this post I purchased on my own.