History

In the interests of completeness these are the first two atcs I ever did.

The first theme was Winter and as with Strawberries and Cream I cut the background from a machine embroidered piece, in this case white organza over white cotton with sparkly bits inbetween the sandwich, densely machine sewn with white cotton in snowflake and jaggy wintery patterns. The motifs were hand stitched and were an exercise in embroidery stitch practice. The centre is silver chain stitch, and the outside a kind of running stitch. In the series I also tried out Cretan stitch round a patch of silver fabric which worked very well.

Then at our first meeting when we all nervously handed over our first atcs, all feeling they were no good and gaining such confidence from talking about how we felt and seeing how good everybody else's 'no good' atcs were.

Fiona gave us paper scraps for our second series: Spring. My background is woven yellow fabrics bondawebbed down which was finickity but looked really good. For the first 6 in the series I embroidered the words S, P, R, I, N and G on each card using green space dyed thread and chain stitch, whipped with a glittery thread. Onto each I stuck one of Fiona's bird scraps. For the last three I used the butterfly scraps and this one is my favourite. I stuck the butterfly down with ordinary glue and stitched round with long and short stitch. I really like the effect on the reverse. I used a technique in a book on fabric postcards to edge this which comprises sewing round the edges three times, each time using zig zag stitch with a shorter stitch length and longer zig zag until you end up with a lovely satin stich, but it did use an entire small reel of Gutermann which is a bit expensive for me!

At this time I did my reverses all in the same font, aiming to have a consistent style, but I've changed my mind and love playing with the fonts instead!