Mermaids and Gardens

I had a very productive evening last night. As I had been hand quilting all day, my fingers simply weren't up to doing any more hand stitching so I made a background for 2 separate Mermaid events on my list. No idea why mermaids suddenly are the "in" thing but I certainly enjoyed making the cards. I'll show you the Lost Art Creations ones as soon as I finished beading them but this one is for a Faux Postage competition run by http://www.artchixstudio.com on the theme of mermaids. We make an ATC using the theme and Helga, the owner of Artchixstudio, selects her chosen ones to feature on a Faux Postage sheet she will be selling through her site. The background is stitched with as many blue threads on a fabric background as I could find and I added an image from Artchix collage sheet E129. This was covered by mica (also from Artchix) . The water god comes from one of my old college books on the classics. Finally a really good use for it! The face and the quotation were rubbed with metallic blue.

As I was rather pleased with the blue background I decided to go multi-colour for the next one on a flower fabric background. These ATCs are for Lenna's Summer Garden ATC Swap, see more details here: http://creativeswaps.blogspot.com. I loved this background even more than the yellow and blue ones and did not want to cover it up too much so I used decoupage lady images (from South Blackberry Design on Ebay) which I applied using Fabric Mod Podge. I then added bits of the glorious flower trim I showed you earlier which Ibought in Holland. The above 3 are for Lenna's swap but I also made one for my 100 ATC project ( no. 58!).The quotation on all of them reads: A Garden in her Face. I beaded around the edges of all of them with some beads from a multi-coloured selection bought in a shop in Hilversum (where I used to live before moving to the U.K.). They are matte coloured which usually I don't care for too much but these were so lovely I could not resist. They go wonderfully well with these ATCs.

On a sad note one of my chickens died today (her name was Lacy). We found her dead in one of the nest boxes. She did not have any obvious injuries so she probably succumbed to old age as she was 6 years old, which is usually as long as chickens live. This makes the matter of getting some more chickens even more urgent as Hector, the cockerel, now only has one "wife" left which is a bit stressful for both him and her (Cagney). So we will be looking out for some nice young ones.