An ATC for Alphastamps February Lottery and pages for Abby's Gypsy album

As an antidote to the windy and wet conditions here in Macbiehill I have made a very sunny ATC for the Lottery on the Alphastamps Yahoo group. When you win this lottery you get to receive all the submitted ATCs so fingers crossed!

For the background I used a piece of their new oilcloth fabric, to be precise the turquoise one with the oranges. This stuff is really gorgeous. It's meant to be used for wipeable items such as tablecloths for both inside and out, beach bags, tablemats etc. and the ones Alphastamps has in their stock come from Mexico and are ever so bright and cheerful. I layered the piece I had cut to ATC size up with white felt by stitching around the perimeter. Use larger stitches than usual and a walking foot if you have one. Stitch a bit slower than you usually do and things should be fine. I used a size 90 machine needle.

I glued on an Alphastamps image which came with their free gift sheet in Spring 2007 of a Mexican looking lady, holding a bottle (more cheer!) and a headcovering featuring oranges too. To this I added an orange artificial feather and the text The Broad Sunshine of Life.

I also finished my pages for Abby's TipTopJournal which has the theme Gypsies. Abby has invented an entire imaginary world for her Gypsies and I tried and incorporate as much of this information as I could on the pages. The background I used was the fabric/paper collage I used for my May Journal Quilt last year as it was so bright and cheerful and featured several images very suited to the Gypsy theme, such as people singing and dancing and playing the flute.

I printed out the scanned in collage onto canvas. I learned this from Abby so I wanted to use this on her pages. The Gypsy girl images come from collage sheets from LostArtCreations. The text was also printed onto canvas and stitched on. I added the beading and and the Life sticker as well as the rose on one of the Gypsy images. I'm really quite pleased by these, very cheerful and sunny looking pages.