Quilled Poppy in Progress (2)

I have now filled in a large portion of a petal. Leaving your chair to rest your back and hands is a good practice to do every hour. Leaving your work a full day helps you view it in new eyes. When I now look at the lines, I wish I had made my lines a bit more wrinkly. I think it won't matter overall when I'm done, but I think the crinkly bits makes it more fluid and realistic, less rigid – you can see I've done that as I worked my way outward.

I hand cut all the ends because I think the tapered trimming makes it look lighter in those areas. To be efficient and save glue, I amass a few strips at a time until it starts to get confusing, then glue at one time.

Although I cut my strips 1/8" with my Silhouette die cutter, I deliberately hand trimmed some to be less in height to make it appear to be fading into the light.

Here's a close up to show how the 3 shades are working with one another. I'll go into my paper and custom cutting in another post.

For the strips that touch the outline, I dip the length in glue, then turn it on its side to dip the short end at the same time. This way I adhere it to my surface and my outline at the same time. Tweezers are a good thing here.

Uh oh! Do you see what I see? One end didn't get pressed while the glue was wet and now it's loosey-goosey. Since I had some comments about my gluing techniques, in my next post I'll show how I fix problems like this - quite easy actually!