Back to (Quilling) School

September is known in the United States as the time of year students go back to school. This year, while our friends and family gear up for the new academic school year, we are simultaneously training hundreds of new quillers and growing our class of quilling students each day!

We have recently opened four more factory locations in Cu Chi District, Nha Trang City, My Tho City and Can Tho Province. Between our now 5 quilling factories we have 363 new quillers being schooled in all things quilling. We thought it would be fun to share our Quilling School Lesson Plan to give a little insight into the process and how our quillers learn!

Lesson 1: Tools Quillers are each given a full set of tools including, tweezers, quilling pen and scissors. They have to become familiar with these tools which they will use each and every day. Perhaps they have a slightly different preference than their classmate for what kind of tweezers they want to use, now is the time to figure that out.

Lesson 2: Paper Possibly the most important lesson is for our quillers to become familiar with the way the paper behaves. They need to feel the difference in paper weights, analyze the colors and how they look different when coiled, and handle it to see how it reacts to bending, rolling, folding etc.

Now its time to start quilling! Each of the following lessons require the quiller to master the previous shape to move on. Students may spend hours quilling only tight coils to master it before moving on to the loose coil. Everyone learns at a different pace!

Lesson 3: Tight Coil The tight coil is essential to any quilling shape. Every shape first starts as a tight coil so this lesson is the building block of everything else. The tight coil helps the quiller master the process of using the quilling pen as well.

Lesson 4: Loose Coil The loose coil is essentially the same process as the tight coil but you remove it from the quilling pen and relax it to be loose. This is very much a mastery of eyeballing the correct looseness needed to fill different sized areas.

Lesson 5: Loose Oval Next we build upon the loose coil and use that to shape into an oval using either tweezers or fingers to gently squeeze either side of the coil.

Lesson 6: Teardrop Possibly the most common and iconic quilling shape is the teardrop; created from squeezing one side of a loose coil. This shape is very simple to learn and extremely versatile when quilling a design.

Lesson 7: Leaf Next, we move onto the leaf. First making a loose coil into an oval, and then a teardrop, you then squeeze the other end to have two points transforming it from a teardrop to a leaf.

Lesson 8: Semi Circle It is at this point the lessons become more advanced shapes that take greater practice. The semi circle combines the oval and leaf lessons to create a half flat, half circle shape.

Lesson 9: Square Since quilling naturally has a circular nature to it, creating a square can be very challenging. First begin with a loose coil, then create a leaf, you then release the leaf and fold in the opposite direction to get four corners.

There are countless other shapes and lessons but for our new quilling students this is more than enough to get started and make them confident in utilizing these shapes to start to create a complete design. Practice and patience are the key!

Try out our lesson plan for yourself if you are a new quiller and try out our DIY kits! Great for both beginner and advanced quillers to practice all of these lessons.