Fabric postcard featuring candles and paper beads

A fabric postcard for the birthday swap on my Trading Fabric Post Cards group.  I love how this one turned out!!  I started with some fabric that I coloured with wax crayons.  After ironing it very thoroughly I was able to get most of the wax out yet it left pretty much all the colour. You can check out the fabric I painted here.  I cut a piece that was 6" wide and then went looking for a fabric that coordinated. I found this striped fabric scrap that was perfect!!  I trimmed the striped fabric to 6" as well and stitched them together.  I did find that my sewing machine had a bit of trouble with the waxed fabric - it was having difficulty feeding it through so it might have been better had I used the waxed fabric on the top instead of the bottom.  Something to watch for next time!  I decided that the stripes looked like candles and that would be most appropriate for a birthday post card.  I added a small piece of batting to the back and stitched all the stripes individually to give "the candles" definition.  I added Heat and Bond to the back of a small piece of yellow fabric and hand cut 11 little candle flames - one for each candle.  I wondered whether there would be any problem getting the heat and bond to adhere to the waxed fabric but there was no problem.  I ironed them all into place and used a fine tip permanent marker to add a wick to each one.  To give them a bit of dimension I used an orange watercolour pencil to add a bit of colour and then used a small wet brush to soften the colour and spread it out a bit.  I stitched the silver ribbon over the bottom section and applied my hand lettered & watercoloured quote over it.  I created it from iron fabric label tape so it simply needed to be ironed into place.  I added two sequins on either end keeping them in place with large french knots.  I thought it still needed a bit of something so I used light yellow floss and running stitches to create light rays around my flames  It added texture and did pretty much what I had hoped it would.  On hind sight, I wish I had added some sewing machine stitching to the bodies of the candles as they are quite plain.  They could have used some texture as well but with the ribbon & quote in place it was not convenient to make that happen.  With the hand stitching done I created a backer from white fabric and creatively stitched some batting to it using my sewing machine.  I put my back and front together and stitched all the way around close to the edge. Once I decided on my edge treatment I realized that it would have been more appropriate to have used coloured thread to stitch all the way around so I used a marker and ruler to carefully apply colour to the white thread to tone it down a bit.  Worked quite well!!   I decided to use the paper beads that I created a while back in my edge treatment.   I cut them in half, covered them in coordinating decorative paper and then included them along with some pink E beads when I blanket stitched all the way around.  It was nice to be able to use a larger needle with fine crochet thread on this piece as it easily managed the holes in the Ebeads and the paper beads.
As I was creating I reflected on my quote - "shine your light".  We are only ones who can shine our light - no one else can do it for us!!  We have the ability to choose to shine bright or not.  We can only be perfectly ourselves because we have a unique set of talents and abilities which cannot really be compared to those of others.  I hope my swap partner will see that we are more the same than not but being different makes us unique and that is worth celebrating especially on our birthdays.
Therese