Local fiber artist Betty Cabe was the recipient of a $1,500 grant from the North Carolina Arts Council at the Cowee Heritage Center that inspired her to try her hand at a new art form and led her to discover quilling.
Quilling, also known as paper rolling, can be traced to the 15th century and is the art form of using narrow strips of paper in order to create fun and decorative designs by rolling and shaping them before adhering them to a board of some sort.
“The paper the nuns during the Renaissance era most commonly used was the gold on the edge of books, they would cut the gilded edges of books off and this was a cheap way for them to imitate the intricate patterns of the much more expensive metalwork and it led to the craft being known as paper filigree,” Cabe said. “But, now it’s called quilling because they used a quill from a birdwing to roll their paper around.”
Cabe applied for the grant last year and was inspired to do so out of a desire to try something new outside of her fiber art and quilting. She said she was made aware of the grant by a close friend and that she used the funds to purchase all the necessary supplies for her artwork that would eventually be publicly displayed in an exhibit which attracted upwards of 100 people in Highlands.
“I had a friend that kept encouraging me,” Cabe said. “So, [when] this came up I thought ‘okay, I’ll apply for this grant and see what happens,’ and they gave me more money to ask for which was wonderful. And I kept saying I’m not paying this money back, I am going to use this and that’s what I did for the last year.”
Cabe’s approach to the art form is different than what is traditionally seen, as she focuses on creating large designs inspired by her experience as a quilter, as well as implementing embroidery into her work.
“It was something different, something I hadn’t done before, but I wanted to take it to a level that I had not seen quilling done,” Cabe said. “Most of what you see these days are just cards, like birthday cards, so I decided I wanted to do pictures. I had a year to complete my project and I ended up with 32 pictures, some of them very large. They are different to what you would normally see and since I was a quilter, I decided to do a quilt design and I did the dresden plate, but it’s all done in paper.
“Then I also did some embroidery designs, the Jacobean embroidery, which is done with wool thread, but I decided I want to do it in paper. I’ve also used some printed canvas pictures that I’ve taken and put the quilling on top of in order to make a different picture. So, it’s just been a great experience for me.”
Cabe said she only knows of two other artists, one in the United Kingdom and one in Australia, who work with quilling, especially on such a large scale. She does not plan on stopping her artistic expansion with just quilling and she said she hopes to get back into quilting and working with fiber along with exploring new art forms.