St Patricks day free quilling patterns

This is Part One of a trio of FREE Quilling Patterns on a St Patrick’s Day theme ,the other two components are a brooch and a gift box.

As always a walk through of the entire tutorial can be found by visiting pages free quilling patterns (see link in side bar)  as always it is recommended that you read the walk through before starting the tutorial as there are a couple of elements gone into in greater depth in the walk through .

But if you want to go it alone here are the links to the downloads

Shamrock pattern print (includes prints for all 3 st Pats Projects)

St Patrick’s Day Card Tutorial

I like the pin so much that  I was for a little while slightly tempted not to post the tutorial or the free quilling pattern  to the brooch , because if I didn’t post the tutorial or the free pattern I would be the only person in the whole wide world to own this piece of jewelry,and that would make me feel special.

But isn’t that one of the wonderful aspects of  handmade items ,even though two people  may use the same pieces to construct something  the two will turn out similar but not the same each is its own unique piece with its own individual charm , character and personality given it by its creator. Even two pieces made by the same person are never exactly the same every piece is unique that’s what I love about handmade gifts they are always one of a kind. When I work on Pages From The Heart Gift books I always feel proud that I am creating a special gift for someone that only I can make its not something that Walmart or Kmart can sell.

I don’t use any machines or tools in my projects such as die cutters , like cuttlebugs or cricut machines or sissix embossing machines  and such, I might use the odd paper punch here or there when cutting out lots of small pieces all the same, but that’s about as far as I go. I don’t in a way believe in these crafty tools , sure they turn out wonderful accurate and precise uniform pieces exactly the same each time and that I think is precisely what I don’t like about them, they take away the uniqueness of handcrafted items everybody that purchases a particular template creates exactly the same butterfly or flower, in my opinion they may as well have bought a card or gift as they did not create it themselves , the machine did. But then I guess that is one of the decisions you must make for yourself are you going to be a crafter an a assembler of pieces or do you want to be a handcrafter a creator .

When I make something I like to be able to say I made it myself, that it is I that possess the skill and creativeness to produce a certain piece not a machine. One of my crafting  ambitions is to teach myself paper embossing, but I want to learn the old fashioned way, with a hand held embossing tool and a hand drawn template, I don’t want to learn if I feed a piece of card in to slot A and then  press button B wait 20 secs hey presto out comes my embossed design, what skill is there in pressing buttons. I could not claim to have personally embossed that design  but I could claim I pressed the button.

All the traditional crafts are dying out you can’t perform the simplest of tasks without a machine, just think about all the kitchen gadgets waffle makers , bread makers ,coffee makers, pretty soon we will have forgotten how things were originally made some already don’t know any other way of making bread outside of a bread maker, or that any other way ever existed.

Don’t misunderstand me I am not against all gadgets,after all  am I not on a PC at this very moment. Some things do improve our lives ,I would die rather than give up my washing machine or microwave oven and the kids would murder me if I even hinted that the TV should go, but there are true labor saving devices and then there are unnecessary labor saving devices that just rob us of our skills and of personal control over our own environment, in a way they handicap us and make us less valuable as human beings. But that’s just my opinion …whats yours?.

OK well I’ve gone on for a while now an a thread I did not expect to take. Check out the tutorial through the walk through  ,while your about it  check out pages design gallery . You can download the rtf version of the tutorial here or from the walk throughs of the free quilling patterns.

I would appreciate your feed back on how easy or hard you find the tutorials and free quilling patterns that I post as recently I was looking at some beginner level craft kits the skills necessary seemed very very few and the craft when complete really basic if this is beginner level then the tutorials I am writing for  craft novices  are way beyond that, I would appreciate your in put. you can e mail me or leave a comment ,comments are always  appreciated as it makes me feel less like I am talking to myself.

rtf version  of the first other three free quilling patterns can be downloaded here.downloaded here