Today I’m excited to share with you a long awaited review for the lovely book Pretty Quilled Cards by Cecelia Louie (author of the beautiful blog Paper Zen). About a year and a half ago (eeks, that’s a long time!) I had already been admiring Cecelia’s blog when she sent me a message asking me if I’d like to review her new book.  I enthusiastically agreed.  The only catch was that the book could only be sent to a US address.  So it was sent to my parents’ house in the US where I had to wait until November to pick it up when I visited.  So last year at the end of November I finally got to hold the book in my hands and admire it. I’m embarrassed that it has taken me this long to write a proper review of it, but better late than never, right?

So over the past couple months my daughter, Svara, and I have been experimenting with some of the designs in Pretty Quilled Cards and then we each made a greeting card for a friend of ours who had a baby a month ago as our final project.

Today I’ll share with you a few photos of things that we made, and our thoughts about the patterns in the book.

After flipping through the whole book together we decided to start practicing some of the techniques by making these hearts which were a part of one of the card designs.  They were fun to make!
Here is Svara hard at work on following the directions in the book!
After the hearts Svara chose a rattle card design to make.  She altered a few of the elements of the design to make it easier for herself, but did a good job of following the directions.
As soon as I saw the book I KNEW that I wanted to make those flowers on the cover!  So that was the design that I tried first.  The instructions don’t say to pin it down, but I found it awfully difficult to get it to stick together properly without pinning it.  I even tried with several different glues including tacky glue to see if that helped, but it kept falling apart on me no matter what.  So I resorted to my usual method of pinning!
And here are my finished flowers.  I also found it tricky to get a clean fold in the petals, but that probably takes practice.  Also you’ll notice that not all of my petals are perfectly the same size.  I guess I need to be more careful in my folding and measuring!
A few days after I made these I attempted more, wanting to use them in my card design.  But I just couldn’t get them to be as perfect as I’d like, so I scanned the book and found another flower design which looked a bit easier.
Here is the flower design I settled on!  I mixed two designs from the book  – the stick from the cherry blossoms, but the flowers from the Mother’s Day card, to make my design.  I think it turned out well!
Pretty Quilled Cards can be found at some local bookstores as well as online on Amazon .

Conclusion:

Paper Quilled Cards is a lovely book!  Sometimes it can be hard to think of just the right design for a greeting card, and this book gives many ideas.  Also, Cecelia’s quilling techniques are a bit unique.  She gives tips on some techniques I never used before.  Softening, folding, and more.  I will be using more of these techniques in my quilling designs now!  She has a very open and loose style which makes for graceful and delicate designs. Even though I have been quilling for more than 20 years I still find that I use my slotted quilling tool most of the time.  However, with Cecelia’s designs I found that they looked a lot better when I used my needle tool to do the rolling.  You’ll notice that with the heart designs I used my slotted tool, but with the card design I used my needle tool.  I got kind of used to using my needle tool, so maybe I’ll continue using it more often for a smoother look to my quilling! I did find some of the designs challenging, as I mentioned.

This book is a good combo of easier designs and more challenging designs.  It’s nice that there is the variety.  Therefore it makes a great book for both beginners and experts! Do you have this book yet?  If so, what is your favorite pattern?  I still love those cherry blossoms even though I have not mastered them yet!

Thanks so much to Cecelia for allowing me to review her book, and for being patient waiting for the review!!

 

Cecelia Elsewhere:

I mentioned in the beginning of the post that Cecelia has a blog called Paper Zen.  You’ll definitely want to give it a visit if you haven’t yet.  She not only is a master of paper quilling, but also of digital paper cutouts.  She has a lot of free patterns on her blog, so check it out!

Cecelia also recently did a quilling class on Craftsy!  I posted it about it a couple months ago.

You can check out the class here:  (pssst, right now it’s on sale for 33% off!!)

craftsy quilling

Cecelia has such a pretty and unique quilling style – open and smooth!  The class has 7 sessions which are an average of 20 minutes each (some longer, some shorter).

You can also find Cecelia on facebook, and her Etsy shop.  If you’d like to see some more reviews of this book, many of which have multiple photos of what the inside looks like, click here on Cecelia’s blog where she has them all listed.

Stick around, there is lots to see around the blog!  Here are some places to start:

 

  • 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!

*I was given this book for the review.  All opinions are my own.
*This post contains 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!