Fly Free ATC

What color is dew? Like rain, it is really clear, but when it sits on the grass in the early morning, it often seems to be a pale yellow-green. With that color in mind for the June Arts in the Cards ATC exchange, I started gathering yellow-green paints, fabric and papers. I’m still enthralled with tea bags, so I gathered used, empty, dry bags from my husband’s daily green tea. I adhered them to my ATC base with PPA (perfect paper adhesive). I have been collecting pretty Ricola wrappers for a while, so I thought the flowery part of the wrapper would hint at a garden. On top of the Ricola wrapper, I cut strips of teabags that I had embossed a white scroll design, thinking it would suggest a garden fence. Below the flowers, I glued strips of green soy batik that I made from an old shirt of my husband’s. It looked naked at the top, so I added more green with Derwent blocks, and then stamped, with green acrylic, some OM symbols. They were too pale, so I covered them with a small vintage image of a butterfly that I found on the Graphics Fairy blog. http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/ In Photoshop, I added the words fly free at the top and papillon at the bottom. For more texture I stitched the butterfly to the card, and finished the edges with Ranger Distress Ink in a color called Vintage Photo.

Fabric Design With Markers and Alcohol

My heart, art-wise, is in fabric design. But getting original designs on fabric without stiffness, stickiness or high cost is always a problem. My friend Janice Paine-Dawes http://thedistoriatedquilter.blogspot.com/ introduced me to the idea of drawing on plain white cotton with permanent markers, then using alcohol to move the color around and create a watercolor effect. It worked like magic! The fabric remained soft and the color bright. The effect was a little hard to control, but it was fun to expect the unexpected, just as I do with watercolor on paper. I scanned a section of the design, then gave it a paint daub filter in Photoshop to make it a little more interesting. The colors were super bright, so I fiddled with it some more, adding a watercolor filter and adjusting the contrast, which made it look very different. With the darkened design, I created some ATCs. The original design was about 9" high x 18" wide, but I reduced it to fit in a 2.5" x 3.5" atc. I added a pale white rectangle across the center with the words "do what you love. love what you do" which is a variation on my favorite Buddha quote: "your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it." In my heart I feel that with fabric design, art quilting and mixed media, along with my paying career of layout design/writing I have found the work that I am supposed to be doing. The ATC looked a little boring still, so I experimented some more, adding embossing powder with a variety of stamps, heating the powder until I got a shiny, enamel overlay. I finished the ATCs with some gold acrylic on the edges. These atcs are very "me" and reflect many things I love, with the original fabric design, some words that are very close to my heart and the two embossed stamps--one lacy and romantic, the other the symbol for the meditation word "om"...not that I meditate often enough, but the ATCs are a gentle reminder of the tranquility that you can achieve through meditation...which is something I need to do more often.