Vintage fabric postcard crazy quilted in pinks and greens

 I signed up for a Vintage Postcard swap on one of my groups - TFPC.  I decided to make it using crazy quilting fabric piecing and embellish it with hand stitching.
I started with a little cross stitch which I started months ago and finally finished.  There was some unraveling involved which may have contributed to the delay.  I machine stitched my little cross stitch to a piece of muslin and then started adding pieces of fancy fabric in pinks and greens - my favorite colour combination.

 These little scraps of fancy fabrics were a RAK in a swap I participated in on my Crazy Quilting group.  Judith asked all of us what our favorite colours were and a little package arrived along with our swap.  As you can see, they are very nice fabrics and it did not take very much of each to create this postcard so there are will be a few more from those scraps.  I have done the piecing technique before where you add strips all around a central element for crazy quilting but I obviously should have reviewed the instructions before I started.  I eventually had to top stitch some of the pieces in place so some review will have to happen before I do it next time.  Fortunately, crazy quilting is very forgiving and

there are few rules to be followed.  You can see above what my postcard looked like before I started stitching it.  It is always fun to add stitching and embellishments!!  I have a stitching book with directions for lots of stitches but the most fun is combining them to make nice borders to embellish the seams.  I started by adding the lace and also created a stitched butterfly and a sequin flower with a stem.  The flower border was fun too which was the element with the most colour.  I am pretty happy with all the stitching - it took a whole day!!  Once the stitching was finished I cut it down to size but because of how I finished my hand stitching I was not wanting to cut my threads so my post card is a bit larger than the traditional 4" x 6" that we normally create on the group.  Hopefully, that won't be too much of an issue for my swap partner.  I created a white layer for the back and added a piece of pellon to it before I stitched the front and back together with straight stitch all the way around the edge.  I am expanding my options for finishing the edges.  This is the first time I have ever used ziz zag on the edge.  I wanted to embellish that a little bit so I crocheted a single chain from pink yard and couched that into the stitching.  I originally used green thread over the pink yard - that was not good!!  So I unraveled that and used pink thread instead and that was much better.  I really like how the edge worked out!!  I will be doing that again!!  So my postcard is ready to go and will be mailed off to my swap partner in the next few days.  Therese

Reusing beautiful images from cards for making new cards

 I have received a stack of used cards and am reusing the images to make new cards!!!  It is a win-win!! I have chosen the smallest cards to reuse as the images are to the right scale for A2 cards.  

For the first one, I chose these beautiful poppies, trimmed the image and layered it onto green and then layered this element to the front of a pink card.  My favorite colour combination!!  I trimmed the gold greeting from the original card, layered it onto pink and then onto my card front on a bit of a diagonal.  Excellent!!

For my second card, I trimmed down the image, tied a length of white fiber on the top between the greeting and the image and then glued this element to a green card front.  Done!!

For my third card, I trimmed the owl from the card and reused the borders from the card on the top and the bottom of the image.  I glued these to a brown card front and added a laser printed greeting below the image. 

For my fourth card, I trimmed the all over floral card front to 4" x 5.25" and added a length of vintage green seam binding before gluing it to the front of a green card.  I layered a laser printed and watercoloured circle greeting (Bird's Cards) to a colour washed scallop circle punchie (SU) which was pierced in all the scallops and adhered it to my card front using 3D foam tape.  I tied on a short length of seam binding to the one on the card with one knot to simulate a bow.  

So a few more cards to add to the stash!!

Therese