Making Paper Quilled Jewelry – Tip #11 – Smoothing Rough and Ripped Spots

I’m back!  I hope everyone who celebrates had a wonderful Christmas holiday.  I actually wasn’t out celebrating, I’ve just been too busy on a project plus had internet problems, so I couldn’t post as usual. I’ll be sharing the project soon.

When you are making paper quilling jewelry there are some designs where you have to use pins to keep the right shape.  And then you have to put on some sealant for it to stiffen up before taking out the pins.  The most recent tutorial that I shared is one of these designs.

The difficulty with this technique is that sometimes when the sealant dries, it has stuck to the pin.  You can usually get it off by twisting the pin, but sometimes this doesn’t even work and when you pull off the pin some of the paper comes with it.  Oops!  This makes a not very nice looking spot on your jewelry.  This can also happen when you use too much glue in a spot. So what can you do about these rough and ripped spots?

Not to worry, you can quickly fix it in almost every case with a little extra sealant.  Here is how.

Inside of the middle triangle in this earring you can see a bit of paper ripped and sticking up, from a pin:

Use a stiff small paintbrush (yes, it’s about time to replace my paintbrush!) and paint some liquid sealant on the spot.  It soaks into the paper easily.  If you use a heavy glaze for this, it might leave the spot lumpy, so something more liquid will be better.  I use Ceramcoat All Purpose Sealer or DecoArt Multi-Purpose Sealer.

Then use a needle tool, toothpick, or other small skinny tool to rub the ripped edge flat into the surface.

And there you go!  Once the sealer is dried you can’t tell there was even a rip in that spot.