ATC Swap

The swap this summer in my Crazy Fridays class was ATCs. My inspiration was some fabric I picked up a few years ago, printed with images of the cards from the Mexican Lotería game -- perfect for cutting out and placing on 2.5 by 3.5 cards. The fabric was a repeat of 24 different images, so of course I had to make all twenty-four cards (just as well that the fabric did not have all 54 cards).

My base was the "tissue fabric" technique I have used before, from Fabric Art Collage. I wanted it to be a mix of purples and teals, but the end result was heavy on the blues:
I'm not thrilled at all with the color, but oh well.

The next step was to fuse the Lotería fabric to the background with fusible webbing and cut out all the cards. To secure the fabric images, I edged each one with hand sewing of some sort, using embroidery, rickrack, beading, and ribbon. It was fun, albeit time-consuming, coming up with a different border for each one. The final step was to back the cards with ultrasuede in different shades of grey and blue. I couldn't bear to zigzag stitch around 24 cards, so I used a straight stitch, which went a lot faster. Unfortunately, at the time I was embellishing the cards I did not think about what would be going under the pressure foot, so some of the cards are a little lumpy and crooked.

The final products:
I gave one to Beadmom, another to Beadfriend, and five were swapped. Which leaves me with a big stack left. Additionally, as I said above, the fabric only had 24 of the 54 cards, which distresses the completist in me. I have the actual game, with all the cards on paper, so I may in the future make a complete set of paper ATCs.

I was also left with scraps of the tissue fabric, which I turned into bookmarks for Beadboy1's therapists:
and an inchie for my collection:

The ATCs I got in return:
This was by the instructor of the class, Diane Rode Schneck, using the stretchy shape bracelets that are so popular with the kids these days. Diane had wanted to glue the shapes down, not couch them, but no glue would hold. That's ok, though, because I like the look of the couching.

By another student in the class. It was created from some sort of technique from Julie Balzer's Journaling class.

A fishy, made from free-hand machine embroidery, a technique that intimidates me (and that also came from Balzer's class). The edges are fuzzy because the creator zigzagged over both the edges of the card and a fuzzy yarn held in place. She owes me a second ATC, because she took two of mine.

The last classmate to participate in the swap was not able to make ATCs because she was too busy sewing dozens and dozens of these little bags for a wedding shower. Instead, she made us cute little bags too, with a bead and a chocolate inside.

On to the next swap!