It started with a jar of jam ...

Quilled wallhanging, a photo by Philippa Reid on Flickr.

Here's another of the items that I displayed at the Quilling Guild's 30th Anniversary Celebration of Quilling in Liverpool last month ... and, yes, it really did start with a jar of jam!

During a short break to Wales earlier in the summer, my husband and I visited the lovely tea room at Picton Castle where we indulged in a classic British afternoon snack: tea and toasted tea-cakes! The tea-cakes came with tiny individual pots of strawberry jam which I noticed were octagonal in shape. So I brought one home and used it as a mould for the black octagonal ring coil that forms the centre of this design.

I wanted to create a colourful quilled wall-hanging, so I added more rings, huskings and other quilled shapes on to the sides of the octagon, building the whole piece outwards from the middle ... and, needless to say, making it all up as I went along!

The green semi-circles inside the central octagon were created by making solidly glued ring coils around a dowel and cutting them in half. I made other whole ring coils for the piece using various sizes of dowel, and had fun filling them up with decorative huskings, 'twisted' wheatears and other quilled shapes. I assembled the whole piece on a cling-film covered board with a visible grid pattern under the film to assist in maintaining symmetry, securing the sections with the aid of pins.

The finished design is displayed in this photo hanging from a convenient metal stand which is actually intended to carry a bunch of bananas suspended alongside your fruit bowl at home!

The moral of this story is: always watch out for the everyday shapes that come into your life and think about how they could be used in quilling! I certainly treasure the little octagonal jam jar that provided the creative spark for this particular piece!