"Sew a Button On It" Self Portrait ATCs

When I saw the theme for a new Paper Traders ATC trade, I thought it was right up my alley. I love buttons, I love sewing, I love ATCs and I love painting. In addition to requiring a button on the atc, another requirement was to use a paper collage background. No problem...collage is my middle name. So, I got to work trying to make the vision in my mind translate into something real. I pictured something soft and romantic, like Sugar Lump Studios, with my favorite lace, maybe some tea bags and delicate stenciling. Something like I did on my blogpost about Faux Lace from Recycled Tea Bags.

First, I took some pretty paper, cut and ripped it into strips, and made a striped background. Next, I used my favorite new Nat Kalbach art foamie positive negative stamps over it with white printmaking paint. It was "meh." I tried lace. No good. Hideous in fact. I auditioned paper doll parts on top. No good.

The next day I was rifling through my paper scraps and found my old art business cards (as opposed to my 9-5-what I get paid to do business cards) with an old address that made them unusable. I have a little logo made of an altered self portrait with one of my fabric designs in the background. I decided to chop up the cards, and the small logo art looked just right on the striped and stamped background.

My worktable (also known as the living room table during the week) with the unfinished ATCs

I added some orange paper from an envelope someone had recently sent me, plopped on a few buttons, stitched them on with orange thread, and ran a brown chalk ink pad around the edges for a finished look. Done. Very far from the soft, romantic, lacy cards that I thought I was going to create, but still very "me"...literally, since the mini portrait IS me. Here is the link to my post called Fuscia Zetti Self Portrait, where you can see the oil painting that I used to make the design that ended up on my art business cards.

Three "sew a button on it" self portrait ATCs. I kept the middle one for myself.

Abstract Sunflower ATCs

Sunflower ATCs should be easy, right? So why did I struggle with making them? I wanted to stay away from cliches, and decided to go abstract...maybe I should have just gotten out my paints and done cutsie little yellow petals with brown centers and called it a day. But I love abstract work, so I sat down at my art table and got to work.

Abstract Sunflower ATCs

First, I started by pulling out my gelli plate, brayers and yellow and magenta acrylic paint. Using various Artistcellar and other stencils, I made about 50 prints on deli paper. They were hideous. Colors too bright, prints too sloppy.

So next I tried layering them onto various papers that I had prepared with a white gesso surface. Some improvement, but still not great.

The next step was stamping some "petals" over the top using sepia archival ink and white printmaking paint on two different Julie Fei Fan Balzer stamps. Better, but not great still. I added a spiral center in sepia and black with an old Retro Cafe Arts stencil, then used a black stamp pad around the edges of the ATCs.

I set the ATCs in my unfinished art box thinking an idea would come to me to improve them. Then I went away for a long weekend to something called "The Letting Go Weekend" in upstate New York. My brother had a lot of insight from going to a previous weekend retreat, so I gave it a try. It was pretty healing and illuminating. I did quite a lot of journaling during the event and feel less stressed, even less compulsive about needing to make art--although I am not entirely sure if that is a good thing or not.

This weekend I decided to finish the ATCs and meet the trade deadline so I added some words with tiny round alphabet stamps and called it a day. So, they aren't the best art I ever made. I don't love them, but like the name of the weekend retreat, I am learning to "let go," move on, and accept that I am not perfect and will not always love my work but I can just meet the deadline and move on. AND maybe somebody will think the ATCs are terrific, after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

Sanded Paper Stencils and Journal Pages

This journal page is about a dream I had. Ever since childhood, I have had a fear of alien abduction. I dreamed that a spaceship was coming to take me, and instead of cowering in fear, I looked straight at it and it got smaller and smaller and turned into a tiny dragonfly, then flew away.

Sometimes it is hard to choose between making art, writing about making art, and spending time doing "shameless self-promotion."  I often get so busy making art I don't realize that I haven't found the time to write about it. Sometimes I get busy taking photos to send to magazine or book editors in the hopes of getting published. Often times I get sick of everything and just make art. On days when I actually have time to take my full lunch hour, I eat quickly and then pull out my journal and paint for rest of my lunch time. So, here are the journal pages, ATCs, altered rolodex cards and other things I have been working on lately.

Journal page about why I love NYC, with all its grunge.

This was a lunch hour journal. The top right corner is a doodle that I made while talking on the phone, which I tore and glued to the page. I added color and enhanced the lines.

On this journal page, I tried a new technique that I read about on the Cloth, Paper, Scissors blog. I tucked stencils under magazine pages and other colored papers, then rubbed sandpaper over it until the stencil image emerged.

Lunch hour journaling--random rambling thoughts and flowing color, with deli paper overlay of white diamond-plate stencil.

ATC with layered painted deli paper, newsprint and stamps

ATC from rqandom art supplies

Altered rolodex cards

Altered rolodex card

Earth Day postcards from recycled junk mail

Altered rolodex card back

Textured ATC

Woven and Burned Paper ATCs, With a Quilterly Influence

Woven paper was the challenge in a recent Paper Traders yahoo group exchange. We were to make ATCs that included some degree of paper that had been woven. It could be a little section, or it could be the whole piece. The theme seemed a natural fit for me: I have tons of paper scraps, and I love weaving. The challenge for me was that ATCs are really small--only 2.5" x 3.5"--so weaving little teeny strips, without a loom for support, was a little tricky.


Woven ATCs using paper scraps, washi tape, lace and fabric scraps.
These used several sentimental scraps, so were kept for my own collection.

I rifled through my boxes and bins looking for thin, pretty strips of paper that were too pretty to throw away, and gathered them together. I used pieces of commercial paper as well as pieces from edges of paintings and painted paper. First, I arranged them in stripes, trying to alternate light and dark, and fat and thin pieces. As I went along, I incorporated washi tape and newsprint and fabric scraps to make it a little more interesting.



A little tape held the paper "weft" fairly secure at one end, but putting in the "warp", and then trying to glue it all down without knocking it all out of alignment, was really challenging. When I finished, I had five little woven pieces. They were cute, but cute wasn't enough. And I don't really "do" cute. So, I asked myself the eternal question: "What next?" They seemed to need a center piece, so I auditioned birds, butterflies, famous quotes and flowers. It all seemed so boring.

So, I stepped a little out of my comfort zone and tried something I had not done in years: intentional burning. Using a permanent black ink pad, I printed some of my favorite Julie Fei-Fan Balzer stamps on a cream "linen" paper. When dry, I cut them out, leaving about a 1/2" edge. Next, I carefully burned the edges. I worked at my kitchen sink, with the water gently running, and blew out the flame or wet it when it was burned to my liking. 

These three woven paper ATCs were traded.

The little geometric burned prints gave the woven backgrounds some oomph, and once the burned pieces were dry and cool, I glued them to the woven bases. The finishing touch was running a sepia stamp pad along the edges of the ATC base to give it an aged look.

The response from members of my art exchange was that they looked like mini quilts. I thought: "Quilts? That was not at all what I had in mind. They were not supposed to be teeny little quilts." But their quiltiness should not have been a surprise. I am a quilt lover and collector, a former art-quilter (retired from that art form due to shoulder injuries) and a former textile designer. So, quilts must be so much a part of my history and my makeup that the quilt style just bubbled to the surface. And it makes me wonder...hmmm, how WOULD this design look as a gigantic quilt?