11th Collage Exchange

I've started work on my 13 collages for the 11th Collage Exchange held down in New Zealand. I participated in this years' one (no. 10) and it was such fun that I'm doing it again in 2009. One collage will be up for sale ( I'll let you know which one towards the 1st April 2009 and you could actually buy that one online at that time!) and another one will go to the collection of the MADD Gallery school of found-art assemblage and collage in Samoa. The other collages will be swapped and I will receive work back from 11 other collage artists. My collages are A4 sized when mounted on the card.

I made a start after my eye fell on a pieced quilt top lingering in my studio. It was to form part of my Reverse Seam quilt series but I'm sort of fed up with this series (although I'm not saying I will never make another one!) and this quilt never caught my heart as testified by the fact that I had still not gotten around to quilting it. So I made a decision on the spur of the moment that I would cut it up and to stop me changing my mind I immediately made the first cut with my rotary cutter.

As I expected the quilt looked a lot better once it was in bits and I used the bits for my collage backgrounds. The other theme I used was my collection of vintage postcards featuring Marie Studholme, a early 20th Century actress, who just looks adorable. She seems to have had a predelection for HUGE hats! I have quite a collection of her cards (and am still discovering new ones on Ebay regularly) and decided to import them into my computer by scanning and then used Photoshop Elements to alter the colours in each card so I could make them blend into my quilt backgrounds.

These were printed onto self-adhesive cotton sheets (from Crafty Computer Paper) and stitched onto the background with zigzag stitching. I also added decorative stitching to the background after layering it with wadding (batting). The texts were printed onto a variety of sheets, both cotton and linen, of which I had left-overs. Finally the collages were mounted onto a cardstock background by machine zigzag.

I then added vintage buttons in matching colours and beaded around the Marie Studholme images with size 11 seed beads and using bead mixes from Whimbeads. I finished these 3 today and will work on the other 9 in the coming days as ideally I would like to mail them asap after Christmas.