Have been working on this postcard for the last few days. I started with strip piecing three rectangles - a blue one, a green one and a brown one - using fabric scraps. It is a new technique to me though it is not complicated and worked well for this project. I trimmed the top edge of the blue one nice and straight and overlaid the green one which I had trimmed with some gentle curves to simulate a treed horizon line. I machine stitched the green one to the blue one using a zig zag stitch and green thread. I then trimmed the edge of the brown one, overlaid it onto the green one and stitched in into place using zig zag then trimmed the whole thing to 4" x 6". On hindsight, the background seems quite busy. It might have been better to use plains, fabrics with less colour contrast or smaller designs though the brown one works the best. I added an interfacing backer and stitched lines in each layer in the coordinating colour of thread to stiffen up my creation. Next, I cut my trees - three circles in different sizes and some brown triangles for trunks. Again, my trunks are too close in colour to the bottom layer and do not give quite enough contrast. Lesson learned. I positioned my trunks first and stitched them into place then positioned the circles and stitched them into place. I really like how they turned out. I wanted a simple embellishment so went looking through my sequins to see what I could find. I found these white iridescent leaves that were pretty close to the right size so I simply modified their colour using Sharpie markers. Really like how well that worked out. I positioned them on the trees and the ground then hand stitched them into place. I cut a white backer that was just a bit larger than my postcard and fused it to the back of my postcard using a light weight fusible webbing. I folded the edges over to the front and found that the white was much to bright so I watercoloured the edges in autumnal colours, ironed it dry and then pressed the edges over to the front. That was much better. I hand stitched the edge using various colours of embroidery floss and a button hole stitch. Love the way that turned out!!! Added the postcard details to the back using a fine tip black Sharpie and my postcard is ready to go to my partner at the end of the month.
Therese
