'Wish You Were Here' postcard

For September's Quilters; Guild Regional Day in Perth the challenge was to make a postcard with the theme 'Wish You Were Here';.  While for most people this had them going in search of farbic for beach scenes, the phrase means something very different for me.  I wish that people I have lost were here, I still miss my grandfather who died when I was 3, and my grandmother who died about 10 years ago.  The latter was a watercolour painter and fierce spirit, she adored all four of us grandchildren and would solve any crisis with mountains of sandwiches.  This postcard is a copy in fabric of a photograph given to me by my aunt, her daughter, who is also an exceptional artist and spirit.  I wanted to give her something I could do, I feel more and more that for the people I care about who appreciate hand work as I do giving of my time in this way is more valuable than a shop brought gift.

I first drew the picture onto white polycotton (never using that again, it's the real thing all the way from now on) using Inktense pencils, I just got myself the full box set of these and they are wonderful.  I then layered two pieces of the cotton with a piece of wadding and free machined the yellow field of oil seed rape and the grasses to either side of the patch.  Then I hand stitched the river before doing more free machining over the top to build up the greens.  I increased the intensity of the blue in my grandmother's smock using the Inktense pencils. Finally I dotted white / beige french knots slong the right side of the path where the cow parsley is in the phtograph and created the oak tree to the right of the picture with french knots using several shades of green DMC floss in my needle.    The other trees are created with short seed stitches in various shades.  The last few reeds and my grandmother's hair were created with single stitches.  Finally I did the border using satin stitch.

We have just lost another friend, only a year older than us, and it reminds me of the importance of keeping records like this one.  I keep a diary on a daily basis, and unless I diarise what I'm creating those I leave behind wont understand my drive to create.  My aunt was astounded when I gave this postcard to her, I find it hard to see my work through other people's eyes, to me it seems uninteresting, but I have to accept others see it differently.  I guess when I create especially when it is for, as in the case of the lap quilts, or of, someone I love very much, that love goes into every stitch in a very karmic way.

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!

Strawberries and cream

After quite a concrete interpretation last time, for the June theme 'Strawberries and Cream' I decided to go abstract. I was in the middle of two classes on making a bag I am ridiculously proud of hosted by the very patient Fiona Brockie at the Seattle Quilt Company and was delighted with finally getting to grips with free machine quilting on a shop Pfaff, I made everyone laugh by commenting 'oh, I didn't realise you didn't have to turn'. I can be a little slow, I blame the brain cells lost in trying to care for a 4 year old.

I carefully made sure I'd cut out enough backing for 9 cards as nothing would be worse than finding I didn't have enough. I ironed bondaweb on the front and then cut out lots of strawberry shapes from scraps. The thing I love about atcs is it slots into my eco friendly ethos meaning that I now rarely throw any fabric away, cutting the pretty motifs off daughter's outgrown clothes, and in this project I was able to use even little scraps. I placed the scraps on the background and ironed them down.

I don't have a free machine foot at present, may be on my wish list for the Festival of Quilts in August, so I used the patterns I had on the machine, a green leaf pattern for the strawberry leaves and cream waves for the cream. If I'd been free machining I would have tried swirls, maybe better not!

I printed the backing cards in a chirpy pink using a funky font called 'Chick'. I cut my embroidery into atc cards and sewed the backing cards on with a machine that was determined not to do satin stitch, well, not to keep tension, it does need a service I think.