Vintage Bathing Beauties

Another lots of swap ATCs bites the dust so I can mail them off together with my vintage nudes to our swap hostess who lives in Australia. This is another swap hosted on the ATCsforAll site and I'm really looking forward to the returns for both this swap and the Vintage Nude one. However I have also put a stickie on my computer screen, which is staring at me as I type this, which reads: NO MORE SWAPS. It has been getting out of control lately and I really need to take a bit of a break and concentrate on my work for Alphastamps, finishing some articles as well as making some quilts!!

The vintage bathing beauties are resting on a background which was very much inspired by the background I made for my By the Sea Gothic Arch yesterday. I used the same blue/white fabric, ironed it on to Fast2Fuse and stitched it all over in a wavey pattern (one of the decorative stitches on my machine) using a variety of blue and white threads. I also couched on some textural knitting yarns in the same colours.

All the images are in paper and from the Alphastamps Bathing Beauties collage sheet. For once I actually glued this on rather than sewing as the backgrounds were too dark for these cards so I cut all that away and was left with no room for a sewing line. I found some sea related texts and also glued these on.

I added shells cut out from another fabric for which I used Bondaweb (Wonderunder) to apply them. I ironed on a blue striped backing fabric onto the other side of the Fast2Fuse and finished the edges by couching down a textural knitting yarn in blue and white.

I made the now usual extra one for my 100 ATC project, made in exactly the same way. It's no. 87 and has the title: Alone on a wide sea!