Embroidered Collage

Just a couple collages for zap pages today.  I had fun working with the hand made paper and the paint chip pieces on the yellow.  I put in a running stitch in dark blue, as a bit of an accent, before whipping it with a fuzzy yellow to green blend.

Shown here is one of the finished postcards that was the motivation behind the previous post on printing my fabric.  I needed a few leaf themed cards to swap at the fiberpaths yahoo group.  I enjoy repeating and varying motifs so I went looking through what I had and found a sheet of overall leaf lace and some leaf motifs.  I painted them with Jacquard fabric paints so the pattern was more prominent than the glaring white and attached them to the card.  I really like how everything looks.  This card and two similar ones will go out in tomorrow's mail.

This is one of a set of postcards I made for an exchange.  The card had to be related to winter and we had to each write a haiku for it.  I didn't know what to do for awhile, then was scribbling and came up with this. 

Symmetrical form - Crystalline intricacy - Lost in heaping drifts

I had a snowflake stamp so I lightly stamped all over the background, which doesn't show up real well in the pic, added a swash of pale blue iridescent paint, then stamped a clearer snowflake on top.  The idea was to enhance visually the contrast between these two ways to look at snow.

My Winter Wonderland postcards, for swaps on two different groups, featured a glittery snowy scene.  I bought blue cotton fabric with some shininess embedded, then drew with Shiva paintstiks, trying those out for the first time.  It was a fun way to get a smooth application of color, but took awhile to dry, longer than I'd expected based on the mini-class I'd taken.  After they were dry and I'd constructed the cards - just wrapped the fabric around cardstock and sewed on another piece of cardstock, I added the foil.  

The card is MUCH shinier in person.  The stars glitter.  The strips that look mostly black in the snow between the blue strips, they glitter a lot.  And there's some foil stuck to parts of the trees and the blue strips as well!  Foiling was another first time experiment for me.  I tried out the fusible for the landscape and painted with the fabric glue for the stars.  Both techniques worked out well.  However, the shiva paintstiks also picked up some foil!  And this was after they'd dried for a week.  That was quite a surprise.  It kinda worked for my theme, but is something I'll have to remember in the future.

I do want to use foiling in a second project sometime.  I definitely want to play more with the paintstiks, textural rubbings next I think.   

The two ZapBooks  themes I signed up for this month were Medieval and Sewing.

I did a series using medieval tapestry images from an Altered Pages collage sheet, a bit of gold, and some tapestry ribbon.  I had intended it to be done at that point, but it looked incomplete, so I pulled out a random sheet of Shakespeare from my stash and added semi-appropriate words.  I'm very pleased with the results.

For the sewing pages I used related book pages overlaid with pattern pieces, hem tape, and paper copies of measuring tapes.  The snaps were the perfect touch and are held on with decent sized globs of gel medium.

I had a pile of scraps on my desk from making pieces larger and then trimming them down to size.  So I used some of them to make postcards.  Three of these already have swaps to go to and I think I know where the fourth will be going as well, it just won't be until next month.