Mountain-y Fabric Postcards

On Vicki's Postcard Challenge at Field Trips in Fiber, the prompt was "If I woke tomorrow with absolutely no obligations I would _______________"

and my response was "go to the mountains!"

I really like making fabric postcards. They are only 4" x 6", so it is a good size to experiment with new ideas or techniques---or use up bits of hand-painted fabrics, embellishments, and that sort of thing.

For my first postcard, I took a piece of green fleece that I had needle-felted with angelina and fibers, and cut a stylized leaf shape. I quilted it on to a black background with lots of colored bits that remind me of colored leaves falling off the trees.

Autumn Leaf, 4" x 6", 2009

I love the shimmer and mingling of the colors on the leaf. If I was going to redo this one, I would not use the fleece as a background for the leaf, because it is quite thick, not thin like a leaf!

Next up is another new one. I had my little container of hand-painted fabric from this summer, and decided that the discharged green and blue fabric had a section that looked like mountains and river.

Snow-Capped Mountains, 2009

The fabric was painted with Stewart Gill Byzantium paint over dried Glitter Glue gel. I showed a picture of it back in July. After the paint dries, you remove the glue and that is the white area. To make the postcard, I just quilted around the mountain peaks and the river, and added more glitter to the white areas and the sky.

Okay, so those mountains are artistic, but realistic? Not so much. How about this one that I made from commercial fabric that I fused and cut into shapes? This reminds me of our cabin in the North Carolina mountains.

Mountain Cabin, 4" x 6", 2007

The next one also reminds me of riding through the Christmas tree farms at our mountain place. I used hand-dyed fabrics for the sky and hills, and a marbled fabric for the foreground. I used zigzag stitches to represent the trees on the hillside. As on many of my cards, I added a fiber around the edge in coordinating colors.

Mountain Memories, 4" x 6", 2007

And here is one more that reminds me of this season of the year. It has artificial leaves, fabric leaves cut from fabric, ribbons, and fused applique from commercial fabrics swirling on a fabric background. A few hot-fix crystals add sparkle.

Autumn Splendor, 4" x 6", 2007