Bookmarks and Postcards for Heritage Day

The Capital Quilters Guild Heritage Day auction is coming up soon on October 1.  In addition to the auction of the quilts, the guild sponsors a Boutique of hand-made items.  I decided to spend this afternoon sewing up some postcards and bookmarks.

I used some fabric paper that I made a long time ago and never used.

The first piece was tissue paper on muslin, along with some collaged paper from a catalog.  The drawn vine or seaweed was an idea for a quilting motif on Golden Threads paper that I no longer needed.

From this fabric paper, I made all of these in the "Undersea" series.

Here is another piece of fabric paper.  I used paper napkin, commercial fabric, painted fabric, and collaged paper.

From that piece, I made two postcards.  The heavy pink areas are pink thread in a decorative stitch from my Janome 6600.

And here are two bookmarks from the same piece.

Another fabric paper I had lying around was made by gluing colorful foil candy wrappers to muslin with watered-down white glue, and painting and stamping over them with Lumiere paint.  These are quite shiny.  Even the silk sari ribbons have a metallic stripe.

The backs of these are painted watercolor paper.

Speaking of watercolor, I cut up a failed painting of a landscape and made a couple bookmarks out of it.  Trust me, this painting looks better in slices!

Tomorrow I go to the doctor, then plan to meet Cathy Kirk from the Capital Quilters' Guild to pick up two tops that were donated for the auction.  They need to be quilted.  My friend Jean has offered to help bind them.

Trying Out Fabric Paper...and Another Collage

Continuing my journey in mixed media, I painted and stamped a canvas board, added some collaged papers and lace, and drew all over it with black ink. The brown shading is done with Conte crayon. The text at the lower right was on a bit of scrapbook paper.  It is the first three lines from a poem by Thomas Campion: 


There is a Garden in her face,
Where Roses and white Lillies grow ;
A heau'nly paradise is that place.


I chose to interpret the poem quite literally!  I like the colors and layering on this one, but might do something about that big green leaf that is pointing to the lady's face.

After reading through the Stitch Alchemy book by Kelli Perkins, I was moved to try constructing some fabric paper.  On my first attempt, I ignored the suggestion to use muslin as the base.  I had this old ugly piece of  rust calico that I wanted to repurpose.  I covered it in tissue papers, scrapbook papers, and magazine cutouts.  The big yellow flower is some of my ill-fated hand-made paper that I painted.

This came out okay, but I disliked the areas where I had applied white tissue paper...and I thought the white and black diamonds were a little stark.  I squirted a Tim Holz ink in "butterscotch" over almost the whole piece to give it a kind of glaze.  Here is a section of it.  The lovely lady was from a feature in the St. Louis magazine in our hotel.

 

This one would be my favorite, except that I got a lot of wrinkles right in the lady's face when it dried.  I attribute this to being a rookie!  I was using a 2-1 mixture of water to Allene's Tacky Glue to attach and seal the papers to the fabric base.

Next up, another green piece, this time intended to be ocean-themed. It is on a muslin base, but the fabric had been dipped in my  turquoise rinse water from painting journal pages.  The seaweed vine was drawn on Golden Threads paper, which I sometimes use for quilting designs on the long-arm.  Everything else but the seahorse is just tissue paper layered over each other.

The next one is a modge-podge of tissue paper, fabric, and a graphic illustration I liked from the Wall Street Journal.

What will I do with any of this?  Who knows?  It's fun!