New Paper Quilling Strips from GraftonPL on Etsy

I always like to hear about new paper quilling companies popping up around the world.  It can be hard for everyone in every country to get what they need close to home.

A few months ago I was contacted by the owner of the Etsy shop, GraftonPL.  They sell their own line of precut paper quilling strips, including hard to find precut fringed strips!  They are based in Poland, and ship worldwide.

It can be cumbersome, expensive, and time consuming to make your own fringed quilling strips.  There are some basic fringers on the market, but usually they can only be used for papers that are 1/4″ wide.  Then there is a great quality fringer on the market that I tested (click here for my review), but it can be pricey if you just want a few fringed pieces.  You can use fringing scissors, but the slits in the fringe won’t be close together so that might not be the look you are going for.  So if you just want a limited number of fringed quilling strips, and you want them nice and even, then buying them precut is the easiest solution!  Enter GraftonPL! You can choose how wide you want the fringes to be, how wide you want the paper to be, and even the weight of the paper!  Choose any color you’d like, including metallics!

GraftonPL sent me a variety of their papers to try out and give you my honest review.  I was not given any other compensation for this post.  Here is a  photo of the fun pack of supplies I got.  The three little booklets you see on the top left are little swatches of all of their colors available.  One book has the metallic papers, another the 80gsm papers, and the third the 120gsm papers.  So handy!  The packs that are all white are the fringed papers, as they are safely sheathed inside a white piece of paper.  The others are a variety of strips.

Here are some of the highlights about their papers:

• They come with adorable and handy color swatch booklets, so you can see the colors of the papers for re-ordering
• There are 3 styles of papers. Metallics (30 colors), 80gsm weight papers (48 colors), and 120gsm papers (36 colors)
• Regular strips can be ordered in 7 different widths
• Fringed strips can be ordered in 3 different widths
• They come in little plastic sleeves labeled with the color, width, weight of paper, and more, so you can easily re-order!
• You can make custom orders if there are specific colors you want to order.
• Papers are 11.5″ long, which is a handy length for keeping them straight and nice in their packages and to fit in drawers without bending.
• The listings on Etsy are very detailed about the weight and size of paper you are ordering, which is very handy for making sure you get just what you want!

I put the papers that I received to the test and wanted to show you some of the projects that I’ve been working on with them!

Firstly I tried out the fringed papers.  A nice touch is that the fringed papers are safely inside a folded piece of white paper so they won’t get tangled up:

GraftonPL sells fringed papers with two widths of fringe (different than width of paper).  This particular fringed paper is style NS 162 as you can see on the label.  That means it is a wider cut fringe.  The width of the paper itself is  5/8″.  Here I made a flower with one strip of fringed paper with a solid circle for the middle, and one pom pom flower made with 2 fringed strips.

These two flowers are made with the same width of paper (5/8″), but the paper style is NS 161.  This means the fringes themselves are more narrow.  Again the flower on the right is made with one strip, the one on the left is made with 2.  Although the paper itself is the same width for both of these, the fringes for this one are cut a little deeper, so the flower ends up being slightly larger.

And here are all four of those flowers next to each other.  Whether you go for style 162 or 161 depends on the look you are going for.  I personally prefer 161 with the more narrow fringes.

I also tried all of the paper strips, in some jewelry designs.  The narrow papers I received were in 80gsm weight, which is a lighter weight paper.  The 1/8″ strips I received were in 120gsm weight, and some in metallic which is 125gsm.  I found, as I do with other quilling papers, that when I use a lighter weight paper I need to use more length of it to get as sturdy of a piece.  For the blue/purple circle earrings I made I used 3 strips of the blue for the outer circle.  For the burgundy beehive circle earrings I use only 2 strips as those were the 120gsm weight.  So if you are going to be using the paper for making sturdy shapes, then you might as well go for the 120gsm weight so you don’t have to use as many strips to get a sturdy piece.  With most quilling companies you cannot choose the weight of your paper, it just happens that some colors are heavier and some are lighter.  So it is nice with GraftonPL that you can actually go out of your way to choose which weight you want in which color!

For the black, burgundy, and red earrings above, all the papers were 120gsm.  The outer oval I made with the 1/4″ (6mm) width, while each layer inside was 1/4″ (3mm).  I thought you might be able to see one color through the other one, but it is too thick to be able to do that.  I  want to try another similar design, but with less dense quilling on each side so you can see both colors from each side.  It’s still pretty cool, though!

The teardrop earrings are one of my classic designs (click here to see more of them).  This is the first time I have used metallic paper for them.  It is hard to see the glistening of the paper in the photo, but the turquoise metallic paper is such a lovely color!

To check out GraftonPL’s full line of quilling paper, click the button below!

Special Discount!

If you make an order by the end of November 2016, you can get a special 10% discount just for followers of Honey’s Quilling!  Enter the code HONEY2016 at checkout to receive the discount!

Looking for more supplies?  Click here for a list of where to buy quilling supplies around the world, organized by country.

Looking for free quilling tutorials?  Click here to find all of the ones I have here on the blog!