X-Ray Cat Fabric Postcard

Several year ago, I participated in an alphabet fabric swap.  Each participant picked a letter of the alphabet and cut 26 six inch fabric squares and then traded with the other participants.  I found this cut cat fabric and cut my 'X' squares.  I had some scarps left and was able to cut a few cats.  Coming across it one day, I thought it would make a cut card.  I set it at an angle.

Working with the browns and blues, I added some triangles in the corner.  As it is, it's a totally cute card.  But it has a secret that I had forgotten.

 

Glow-in-the-Dark.

Really must find myself some more of this magic type of fabric.

Glow in the Dark Fabric Postcard.

 

Fun fabrics

There are all sorts of wonderful conversation prints available.  I pulled a few of them from my fabric stash.  They are all left overs from earlier projects.

I use a 6 1/2 inch square ruler to help determine what will show in the area of the card, then I cut the fabrics to size.

 

 

The fabrics are nice the way they are, but I know they can look better with a bit of added stitching and some shiny embroidery threads.

 

 

For this one, I outline stitched around the bars and around the mr. Goodbar writing.

 

unembellished

 

Lots of top stitching.  I used a grey embroidery thread to emphasize Hershey's.  I started at the bottom of the H and continued across not cutting the threads between each letter, instead, I used a brown sharpie marker to colour the grey thread between letters. You can spot just a dot of grey between the bottom of the E and the R.   This card has been mailed out to ?

 

I use an embroidery foot to free hand most of the stitching,  for some of the longer straight lines  I use the regular foot and the feed dogs to more the card.

 

This is such a nice print, that it really didn't need much.  I used black thread to outline various aspects of the shoes and grey for the balls.

 

Years ago, I made a pillow case with this fabric.

 

I used some ideas from Zentangles to fill in the stars.  Yellow, orange, green and red threads were used.

 

I was given a piece of this fabric that a friend had left from a quilt.  it's shown up in a few of my craft items over the years.

 

I wanted to emphasis a few of the features.  I used a thread painting technique to over stitch the heart, the alien, and the word love.  I also re-embroidered around the word whatever.  It used to be the bright blue that shows in the middle of the letter a.

Paisley Power

Paisleys are wonderful. There is so much you can do with them.  One of my Zentangle friend's challenged a group of use to tangle some of them.  Since it was a loosely defined challenge, I thought I would try and stitch mine. I wrote about it on my other blog, Books and Quilts.  I'll also post the photos here.

Most postcards I start right in on the stitching, but this required some pre-planning and a couple of sketches.  Not all tangles can be done successfully on the sewing machine, but those continuous line ones work perfect.

 

Last year I cut fabrics for several floral quilt projects and had a bunch of equal size strips remaining.  I sewed them together and set them aside.  They worked perfect for the background for my first attempt.  The black stitching barely shows up.  I stitched on the fabric and the thick layer of interfacing.  Since it already had the fusible on the back, I found it a bit difficult to manipulate and move smoothly.  I'll have to try some other arrangements and see if I can an improve on that.

 

 

 

I was hoping that changing to pink thread would help with the visibility, but it didn't really work. A more drastic approach would be needed.

 

 

Pink fabric and black thread.  Now it really shows up.  This time I decided that I would use one tangle for the inside of the paisley.  I'm happy with how this turned out.

 

I thought the stitching might be more visible taking the picture on an angle. As you can see in the next two photos, it did help a bit.  A big advantage of these little projects is that if something doesn't work, I can still finish the project and quickly move along to the next variation.  

Postcards from pre-printed fabric panels

Today's set of postcards started with a purchased panel.  Actually it was a width of fabric strip that I purchased for about $3.00. It was badly printed, skewed and printed right into the selvedge.  It was also much smaller than a standard postcard size.  |A bit of improvising would be needed.

There were also pieces for the back, but again, they were too small, so I set them aside for a future project. 

 

One of the pieces shown on top of a 4 x 6 inche piece of thick interfacing.

 

Simply set with a strip of fabric on each side.  I purposely set the panel off square so it would be obviously skewed. A little bit off square would make a viewer think I made a mistake, where as being off square by a larger margin looks as though it was done on purpose.

 

Really set off square.

 

To me, the words slanting downward is more pleasing, but I wonder if a right handed person would consider the words slanting upward more pleasing.

 

 

This time, I moved the panel to the top of the interfacing and added fabric to three sides.  The bottom strip was trimmed from and earlier postcard.

 

 

A little more play, moved this panel to the upper right corner requiring only strips on two sides.  Unfortunately when this one was designed, the paint for the working was a pale pink that hardly showed up.  I used a Pigma pen and coloured it a darker pink. Very effective.  Check the first photo in this post and you'll see the difference.

 

As part of  "A Month of Letters", I'll be sending one of these cards to a quilting friend.

Four in One cards

 This is my first postcards for the 350 Postcard Challenge.  These were started last year, but for some reason got pushed to the side.  Unfortunately I didn't take photos of the process, but I will repeat it at some point this year and document the entire thing.  Using scraps, I made four pieced units, each larger than 4 x 6 inches.  After pressing, I layered and pinned them on top of each other.

Using a rotary cutter, I then cut them into 4 sections.  I resorted everything, so that I had a different colour combination showing in each section.  These were then fused to the heavy interfacing.  For these two cards I used a machine embroidery thread for the stitching.  I completed two of the set earlier, and for the embroidery I used regular sewing thread and the result was a much heavier look.

 

The original two cards are shown on the left, and the ones I recently completed are on the right.

Fabric Postcard Challenge. for 2014

Every now and then I have to shake things up and break out of my normal routine.  This year I have challenged myself to stitch 350 fabric postcards.  I have no idea if I'll be able to accomplish this lofty goal, but I am going to try.

For those who don't know what a fabric post card it, well, it's a post card made from fabric.  It has fabric on the front, plainer fabric on the back where you write and place the stamp and a really stiff layer in the middle to keep it rigid in the mail.  Yes, you put a regular postage stamp on it and send it through the mail.  It's barely noticeable, but at the bottom of the first two postcards, are the bar code that the sorting machine prints .

 

This next photos is the back of a card that went through the mail as well.

 

I hope that you'll join with me to view my journey through the rest of the year as I explore the making of all sorts of fabric postcards.  And to keep you coming back, I'm letting you know that I'll be holding the occasional contest  to have one of them mailed to you.