Hi, all! I’m Jeanette Nyberg from Artchoo where I offer all sorts of art projects for kids and design for kids. I live in the Chicago area with my family and I love coming up with easy ideas for kids to be creative every day.
We are big fans of paper projects here and I’ve been wanting to try a basic quilling project for some time. This is extremely basic – if your kids enjoy this they may want to explore some more complicated quilling techniques. I found some amazing videos on You Tube.
In any event, this project will introduce to your kids (or reinforce) the idea of using paper as a 3-dimensional medium instead of it always being flat. Poor paper just wanted to evolve…
UPDATE: We Made a Craft Video of How To Paper Quill
- Colored Card Stock
- Something to coil the paper around (we used a small paintbrush handle. A pencil was too thick and made the insides of the paper spirals too open.)
Cut small strips of colored card stock. We used white, light pink, and red. The strips were approximately 14 x 1 cm. Older kids can use a craft knife to cut strips, but we found scissors worked quite well- the strips don’t need to be perfectly even.
Coil the strips, one by one, tightly around the paintbrush handle. They will stay coiled when you remove them.
Fold a full piece of colored card stock in half (this is the card itself). Using 2 strips of card stock, form a heart shape and glue the strips onto the front of the card. We applied glue to the edge of the strip and held it in place for about a minute per strip. I then placed a light box over the heart to keep it in place while it dried for about 1/2 hour.
Now is the fun part! Dip each coil into a puddle of glue and place inside the heart. We used 3 colors, but feel free to experiment with more or fewer colors.
That’s it! Don’t forget to inscribe the card with a sweet message to your valentine…
Be sure to visit Artchoo for more creative ideas for kids, including these projects: