Cut-Coil Quilling for Rounded Flowers

I was buoyed by my quick and happy results from the cut coil technique for pointed petal flowers I showed in an earlier post, and assumed a rounded petal version would be just as easy. I started off well enough, with this flower as my first attempt.

It was a rocky road after that. I found it difficult to achieve results consistent enough to explain my process.

From top left to right, the strips measurements I used were:

1) 3 x 3" strips, not loosened
2) 4 x 3" strips, quilled with a skewer
3) 1 x 1.5, 2, 2.5" strips
4) 4 x 4" strips, uncoiled and re-coiled by hand for a looser coil = too many large rings
5) 3 x 3" strips, flattened curves by hand after cutting
6) 4 x 3" strips
7) 4 x 3" strips, not loosened at all
8) 4 x 3" strips, curves massaged after cutting
9) 4 x 3" strips, curves massaged after cutting

I enjoy these flowers overall, but want to make them more consistently, so they look like a bouquet and belong together, because I'd like to show how to make another monogram using the cut-coil technique in the future.

In example 4, uncoiling and re-coiling by hand is what I do to relax the tension of a coil. After coiling a strip, the tension is quite tight (as seen in the 2nd photo below). I use my tool to uncoil it, stopping just before the innermost coil. Then I re-coil it by hand, controlling the tension as I go to make a looser coil. This is different from simply coiling it loosely the first time, because now the paper has a memory of how it's been shaped. I'm simply doing it looser, and it ends up being concentric, like a conch shell. I show photos in my book, Pretty Quilled Cards, and I'll show it here in this blog when I get a chance to shoot again (I dropped my light bulb and it's shattered now).

I usually coil at the very tip of my tool, but since I wanted to cut the coils, I wrapped the paper further down the tool to have a larger inner circle.

I even used a skewer stick to achieve larger circles. I would save the tightly wrapped coil for the innermost part of my flower as a starting point of the flower.

I think the main difficulty lay in the fact that after the coils were cut, the arcs were so different and needed massaging into a usable curve. The pinched petals in my previous post were already mainly shaped. So this type of flower took more time for me and it was harder to maintain consistency.
Anyway, I hope you have better results than I did! If you do give it a go, I'd love to hear about it. 

Phillippa Reid of Quilliance had already made the leap to this flower and has made a wonderful cut-coil round petal flower, encircled with a mix of techniques and colors. She has also experimented with cut-coil methods previously and has other links in her post worthy of a visit!