This tutorial offers both historical context and step-by-step instruction on a paper craft with broad uses today and throughout time: paper quilling

Tutorial developed by Kalea Furmanek-Raposo

Digital design by Kalea Furmanek-Raposo

Kalea’s finished paper quilling (2024)

Quilling, also called mosaicon, paper mosaic, rolled paperwork, or paper filigree, is a paper craft that uses long strips of coiled paper to make three-dimensional designs on a surface. Although today we primarily find this paper craft on greeting cards, historically, paper quilling was found on frames, tea caddies, fire screens, tables, small boxes, the bones of saints, and more. This intricate paper work is often used as a substitute for filigree (that is, precious metal work).

While paper quilling may be as old as the history of paper manufacture itself, early evidence of this craft comes from nunneries and monasteries. In the fifteenth century, nuns and monks began to use quilling to decorate religious symbols, portraits, and even reliquaries (which house the relics of saints) (“Quilling or the Art of Rolling Paper”; "Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Paper Filigreework, with an Accurate Description of the Present Practice of That Ornamental Art."). Such intricate quilling was done with thin strips of plain paper and then covered with a layer of gold leaf or gold paint. Quilling became a fashionable pastime and was even taught at ladies’ boarding schools in the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, steam-driven paper-making machines and the production of wood pulp made paper cheaper and more readily available. Extant examples of nineteenth-century paper quilling use both plain paper and recycled strips of printed paper. Mass print production (facilitated by the high-speed printing press) and mass paper production thus made quilling an accessible and relatively inexpensive craft (Price 240; Landow). Depending on the surface on which the quilling was done, Victorians preserved their paper quilling beneath glass (for quilling on a paper base) or a layer of varnish (for ornamental quilling on furniture) (Bemrose 4).

Representations of paper quilling in literature from the nineteenth century demonstrate how enmeshed hands-on work was in the development of relationships between women. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Lucy Steele and Elinor Dashwood work on a “fillagree basket”: “I am only waiting to know whether you can make your party without me, or I should have been at my fillagree already. I would not disappoint the little angel for all the world: and if you want me at the card-table now, I am resolved to finish the basket after supper” (164).

Paper quilling patterns and kits complete with pre-cut strips of coloured paper were advertised and distributed by magazines and newspapers. This activity fell out of popularity at the end of the nineteenth century. Just as paper quilling gained popularity early in the century because of paper’s relative preciousness, paper quilling lost popularity late in the century because of paper’s increasing cheapness and ubiquity.

Click here for a list of scholarly sources, websites, blogs, pincushion patterns, and historical examples. Click here to read my reflection on paper quilling.