Tuesday Tutorial with Kira

Hello friends!  It's Kira and I am back with a fun tutorial for you today.  First, I wanted to talk a little about inspiration.  I love Instagram for most of my inspiration; there are just so many talented people on there.  But when I first joined about a year ago, I was only following paper crafters for the longest time.  I love to get inspiration from everywhere though!  And one of my favorite sources of inspiration is quilters.  And the initial source of my tutorial is from one such quilter, Janice Bailor (You can find her on Instagram @laruedefleurs and she also has a link to her killer Etsy shop there).  I loved how her fabric "feathers" looked so much, I modified them to suit my paper crafting needs.  So with her permission, I am sharing that tutorial with you!

To start, you'll want to choose some paper.  I am working with the 6x6 Crate Paper Good Vibes paper that came in the Pocket Life kit, but any paper will work, even pulling from your stash would be a great option.  I cut my paper down to varying widths, between 1/4" to 1/2", but again, any width will do!

After you've cut down your strips, you will adhere them on some paper.  I used plain, white printer paper so my sewing machine wouldn't have too much thickness to sew through.  And just a dab of glue will do right in the center of your strips.


(If you don't have a sewing machine, you can still make these!  Just glue the strips completely down on your paper and omit the stitching part of this tutorial!)

After you have your strips glued down (I glued them down about 6"-8" up my page), you will stitch down each strip, forward once and reverse once, until all the strips have been stitched.
 

 Now it's time to cut your feathers!  You can  create your own template for your feather half, or just print off mine to use.

You will place your half feather template at a slight angle on top of your paper strip block.

Trace around your template and then cut.  Then flip your template over and repeat.

You should have two feather halves now.

Now to make your quill.  I free handed mine and you can make yours however you'd like.  But I started with a 1/4" strip of paper (I used the Wild Child 5 paper from the main kit). I adhered my feather halves on a piece of printer paper with a slight gap between the two.

Then I put a small amount of glue on my Wild Child paper and adhered that in the middle of my feather.  I trimmed down the edges to make it look more "quill-like".

And to finish it off, I stitched down the center of the quill.

What do you think?!  Aren't these just the coolest embellishments?!

I used mine on a 12x12 layout.  We have a duck pond just blocks from our new home and my kids love going down to feed the ducks.  A picture of my son with the ducks seemed like the perfect photo to use these feathers on.

 

I made three for the layout and clustered them to the left of my photo.  I created even more texture behind them but tangling up a bit of the thread.  Below the feathers I added a piece of chipboard from the embellishment kit, ephemera from the main kit and PL kit and a cork heart from the PL kit.  I made a bow out of some ribbon from my stash and threaded the tag with some bakers twine from an old Citrus Twist kit.

I used the High Five thickers for my title, and layered some ephemera, chipboard and cork hearts below it.  I added some more thread underneath the chipboard too, so that element is repeated throughout the page.

After adding more embellishments throughout the page, I finished it off by adding some black splatters, which mimicked the black splatter print on the 6x6 paper from the Good Vibes collection.

 

Thank you so much for stopping by!  I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and try it out for yourself!

Until next time,

Kira