The color prompt for the August Arts in the Cards
http://artsinthecards.blogspot.com/ ATC group trade was cucumber, so I thought of the soft green, almost white inside of a cucumber, but also of the dark green exterior. As I rummaged around in my stash of paper and fabric looking for pieces in the green family, I found some artistically paint-splattered coffee filters from Sonja Hagemann.
http://sonjahagemanndesigns.blogspot.com/ Sonja recycles her daily coffee filters by using them to blot up paint spills, or puts them behind fabric that she is hand-painting to absorb the excess. She often uses them as packing material when mailing her ATCs. I found two that had a green cast—one was in soft greens and beiges, and one with darker, earthy green tones. The question was: How do I split two round filters up for 10-12 ATCs? I decided to divide the circles into 12 pieces each, and then used a glue stick to adhere a light triangle and a dark triangle to an ATC blank. It wasn’t a perfect fit, so I added a strip of my “faux lace” (made from stamping white designs onto recycled teabags) to the right side. I decided the ATCs needed more interest, so I printed a vintage butterfly from The Graphics Fairy
http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/ on silk fabric, painstakingly cut them out, and then glued the butterfly onto the card. But…it looked too much like my “Fly Free” ATC from the “Dew” trade a few months ago. So, I decided to use white embossing powder to further enhance the card. I selected three stamps: half of a wrought iron gate inspired stamp, and two Tibetan wood blocks—a paisley and a small OM symbol. Each card was embossed slightly differently. I tried not to obscure the butterfly too much so it would still be partially visible. There was a bit of a color shift—the heat gun that I used to emboss the designs cooked the paper a little, and the green cucumber colors became slightly more olive, and the butterfly colors a tiny bit duller, but overall I was very happy with the end result. The final touch was a little dot of dimensional fabric paint on each corner.
