She's Kidding, Right?!

Pam, Pam, Pam. I think the woman stays up nights thinking of ways to make me crazy. I think she needs more sleep. Honestly. I told you that there was a story behind my aversion to today's challenge. Well, somehow, Pam has spies in my crafty space and found out the things that I am not wanting to do! How does she do that?! I didn't even cheat last week! All I can say is, I'm so glad the DT gets the challenge list a week in advance!

The challenge for today at 365 Cards is to use QUILLING on your card. Now, for those of you who do not know what that is, it means you coil skinny strips of paper up, squash them into shapes, and glue them together to make stuff. Ok, about 8 years ago, I decided I wanted to try quilling. It was popular in scrapbooking at the time, and you could buy premade goodies. So, me being me, I purchased a quilling tool and a bunch of the precut paper strips and decided to make my own, thank you very much.

I then got the idea to enter a swap, thereby having to make 25 sets of 4 quilling "deco squares." Deco squares were 2 inch decorated squares. And each of mine had a quilling project on it! Poinsettia, tree, whatever else I cooked up. So that's 100 quilling projects! And did I mention you need to use GLUE? Wet glue?! That I despise touching?! That cured me forever of quilling!

Fast forward to about a year ago when a friend told me she was going to learn quilling. So I gave her all my junk. I was never touching that stuff again! Until TODAY! So, here is my quilling project. Made WITHOUT my quilliing tool and WITHOUT the precut paper strips! Happy now, Pam?! I think I am twitching....just a bit...on one side...

I grunged this baby up. Guess I took out some frustration on my paper! The printed paper is all from those big stacks that we all buy and then use 5% of the paper in them. The stamp is SU.

There is my quilled poinsettia. I cut paper to about 1/8 inch, or so. You can tell my paper strips are not uniform! Then I wound the strips round the tip of my paper piercer to roll them up. For the petals, I just squeezed the rolled coil a bit to smash it into a petal shape. You need to glue the ends with wet glue. The center is just a coil. The leaves are punches, that I rubbed with a embossing stylus to give them some dimension.

Gluing these puppies together is frustrating. So, I glued the leaves, petals, and center to a square of cardstock, then after the glue was dry, trimmed it all round so you cannot see the "background" but everything is all held together and stable.
And that's the end of my quilling saga!

This card is also for The Play Date Cafe challenge 07. They wanted red, white, green. I'd never been to that site before, but Julie posted a comment here on my blog and asked me to enter an older card she saw here. But I did not think it fair to enter a card I had made before they posted the challenge, so I'm entering this one instead. (See, I don't cheat when it counts.) And, this card is also for Practical Scrappers who wanted something Christmas themed.

ETA: For those who are new to my blog...I am just busting Pam's chops. I am not really upset about the quilling. Honest...{twitch twitch twitch}