Monday, March 06, 2017

Fabric postcard featuring candles and paper beads

A fabric postcard for the birthday swap on my Trading Fabric Post Cards group.  I love how this one turned out!!  I started with some fabric that I coloured with wax crayons.  After ironing it very thoroughly I was able to get most of the wax out yet it left pretty much all the colour. You can check out the fabric I painted here.  I cut a piece that was 6" wide and then went looking for a fabric that coordinated. I found this striped fabric scrap that was perfect!!  I trimmed the striped fabric to 6" as well and stitched them together.  I did find that my sewing machine had a bit of trouble with the waxed fabric - it was having difficulty feeding it through so it might have been better had I used the waxed fabric on the top instead of the bottom.  Something to watch for next time!  I decided that the stripes looked like candles and that would be most appropriate for a birthday post card.  I added a small piece of batting to the back and stitched all the stripes individually to give "the candles" definition.  I added Heat and Bond to the back of a small piece of yellow fabric and hand cut 11 little candle flames - one for each candle.  I wondered whether there would be any problem getting the heat and bond to adhere to the waxed fabric but there was no problem.  I ironed them all into place and used a fine tip permanent marker to add a wick to each one.  To give them a bit of dimension I used an orange watercolour pencil to add a bit of colour and then used a small wet brush to soften the colour and spread it out a bit.  I stitched the silver ribbon over the bottom section and applied my hand lettered & watercoloured quote over it.  I created it from iron fabric label tape so it simply needed to be ironed into place.  I added two sequins on either end keeping them in place with large french knots.  I thought it still needed a bit of something so I used light yellow floss and running stitches to create light rays around my flames  It added texture and did pretty much what I had hoped it would.  On hind sight, I wish I had added some sewing machine stitching to the bodies of the candles as they are quite plain.  They could have used some texture as well but with the ribbon & quote in place it was not convenient to make that happen.  With the hand stitching done I created a backer from white fabric and creatively stitched some batting to it using my sewing machine.  I put my back and front together and stitched all the way around close to the edge. Once I decided on my edge treatment I realized that it would have been more appropriate to have used coloured thread to stitch all the way around so I used a marker and ruler to carefully apply colour to the white thread to tone it down a bit.  Worked quite well!!   I decided to use the paper beads that I created a while back in my edge treatment.   I cut them in half, covered them in coordinating decorative paper and then included them along with some pink E beads when I blanket stitched all the way around.  It was nice to be able to use a larger needle with fine crochet thread on this piece as it easily managed the holes in the Ebeads and the paper beads.
As I was creating I reflected on my quote - "shine your light".  We are only ones who can shine our light - no one else can do it for us!!  We have the ability to choose to shine bright or not.  We can only be perfectly ourselves because we have a unique set of talents and abilities which cannot really be compared to those of others.  I hope my swap partner will see that we are more the same than not but being different makes us unique and that is worth celebrating especially on our birthdays.
Therese

St.Patrick Day cards!

I have started on St. Patrick's Day cards!!
For the first one, I created a digital image using Corel Draw which combined three hearts to created a shamrock, added a stem and then surrounded it with a greeting - "Wishing you the luck of the Irish this St. Patrick's Day".  I  printed off several in different sizes.  This one was printed so it could be punched out with a 1 3/4" circle punch.  I layered it onto green (Nestibilities) and then added a white scalloped circle below that.  I pierced all the scallops with a push pin and sponged the edges just a bit to tone them down.  I created a background by gluing strips of green decorative paper to a light cardstock substrate then stamped a "zigzag stitching" over all of the joints.  I added green ribbon and then mounted this element to green card front.  I added my layered focal element over the ribbon using 3D foam tape. It still needed "a bit of something" so I added green rhinestones to the right of the element and that was good!  Like this one!!
The next card was created using a laser printed digital image I found on line.  I trimmed out the image, sponged the edges with green ink and added gold glitter glue to all of the dots in the green area on the outside of the shamrocks.  Once that was dry, I added a black gros grain ribbon across the bottom section adhering the ends to the back then adhered the whole element to a black card.  I chose a little serendipity heart to glue over the ribbon to add a bit of interest and dimension to my card!!  It5 might have been better to be a shamrock but I did not have one!!  The gold in the heart echoes the gold in the glitter glue!!  Quick and easy!!

Therese