Nine Pointed Star Frame Design

Finally I have something new to share with you all! This nine pointed star frame design has been a labor of love for me in the past couple months! As I’ve mentioned, Erin from Little Circles hosted her third annual quilling contest recently. I didn’t have time to participate the last two years, and I don’t know when I’ll have time again, so I took the opportunity to work on a project for this year.

My daughter and I were on a 6 week break from homeschooling between grades, so it was perfect timing. I started thinking about what I’d like to do. I definitely wanted to incorporate several quilling techniques in one design. And I definitely wanted to use transitioning as one of the techniques (see how to do transitioning in this tutorial from Erin available here on Amazon or as a FREE download here on her shop website).

I played around a bit with some shapes and spent a few days making a fun project, but it was a fairly small finished project, so I decided to save that and start again. (I’ll be sharing that project soon as well, just need to take some final photos).

I decided to make a framed design, as it’s been a long time since I have done that, so it would be a nice change. I also decided to make it a nine pointed star frame design, as nine pointed stars are a symbol of the Baha’i Faith, of which I am a member.

For the base of my design I used a Border Buddy to make nine large black triangles. I then arranged my nine triangles into a star pattern and pinned them down (I used a compass to draw my own nine pointed grid to put under the plastic on my cork workboard so I could make sure my nine points were even!

I found it so difficult to choose a color theme! But I knew that if I didn’t give this as a gift, I would be hanging it on my own wall, so I went with a color theme that I like, red! Plus I was lucky enough to have several of Erin’s Culture Pop red colors in my stock, so I used those.

It can be tricky to find a lot of shades of a certain color that go well together, but Erin has made it easy with her WIDE range of colors! Someday I want to have all of her colors, but I just have a selection for now. The colors I used for this project were, from darkest to lightest:

The great thing about having so many shades of a color is that when you want to make a sort of ombre design like I did, you almost don’t even need to use the transitioning technique! I only used it between hubba bubba and red hot betty, and brandywine and speeding ticket. The other colors are really close to each other so they naturally transitioned.

I wish I could show you the progress photos of this project. I DID take progress photos, I just can’t find them or accidentally deleted them, I’m not sure. It’s frustrating!!

After I finished the base design, I tried it out in the frame and it looked like this:

I decided to add a Baha’i symbol to the middle, either the ring symbol or the Greatest Name symbol. My husband printed them out for me and I tried them out:

For all my photos of the frame I removed the glass in front. I never can get a good photo of something in a frame with glass over it! Here is a bit of a closeup: The strips of paper in the triangles were each about 2″ long.

I like the simple look of this design, but as it was for a contest, I decided to make it more fancy! So I added some designs around it including multi strip scrolls. Click here for a free tutorial on how to make the scrolls by Susan Quilling.

And a bit of a closeup:

Lastly I decided to decorate the matte of the frame as well, to make it a bit more fancy. I had a really hard time deciding what to do for the design on the matte! In total, I can’t tell you how many pieces I made, how many photos I took to look at side by side to see what I wanted to do. I even took a week off as I had other stuff to do anyway, and came back to it. Finally I decided on this:

I made larger multi strip scrolls, and I made the nine pointed stars that I make for my nine pointed star earrings, only I made each petal with three colors instead of just one, for that ombre effect. I loved how the little stars turned out, and actually made more in other color themes for earrings. I’ll be sharing those on the blog as soon as I get finished photos of them!

So it was the day before the deadline and I finished my design. Whew!!! Was I happy with it? Well, I liked the design I came up with, and I spent as much time as I could on it. I wish I had three times as much time, but with two girls at home, the housework, cooking, and a baby on the way, it was all I could do to devote an hour or two a day to the project (with much of that time being thinking and re-thinking my design LOL). I was just happy that I managed to participate with something larger than a pair of earrings!

In case you are curious, here are all of the entries for the contest. There was a wide range of types of designs and complexity. There were many seriously impressive designs that I could tell took weeks or even months to finish. Someday I’ll have the time to devote to quilling that I’d like. There are so many types of wonderful projects I want to try! It was fun looking at all of the beautiful entries, and fun being one of them!

Here is another view of my final piece:

As this nine pointed star frame would be a great gift, I did list it for sale in my Zibbet shop here, with varying degrees of complexity as seen in this post. I can make custom designs with all sorts of color themes and decorative accents. Have an idea you want me to make for you? Just ask!

To see some other frames that I have made, click here!
Click here to view more free paper quilling tutorials!
Click here to view paper quilling tips and tricks!
To find places around the world to buy quilling supplies, Click here!

*All products and supplies mentioned in this post I purchased and/or made on my own.

*This post contains some Amazon affiliate links, and some non affiliate links. If you purchase products through the affiliate links I get a small percentage (at no extra cost to you!). I only link to products that I believe in and/or love to use myself. Thank you for supporting my blog!