Artchix Flourishes ATC Swap

I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly imagined just how I wanted to make the ATCs for the Flourishes Swap hosted by Artchixstudio, which is rather remarkable as I had more or less decided not to participate. Also the magnificent ideas I tend to have during the night usually turn out not to be quite as brilliant as I imagined them to be but I have to say in this case I did exactly as I had dreamed about and they turned out lovely!

The only requirement for the ATCs was that we have to use images from Artchix Art Flourishes collage sheet or from the same transparency sheet (which I choose to use). I also wanted to make ATCs with my very favourite subject i.e. lovelies from times gone by! Usually I use images from my own vintage postcards but in this case I choose equally beautiful ladies from Artchixstudio Loveliness collage sheet.

The cards were made as follows (and involved quite a bit of recycling!):

I started with a large sheet of cardstock (from Amazon's over generous book packaging) and glued on a gold page of wrapping paper (after I ironed it flat, and of course from one of my Xmas parcels). I then cut the resulting sandwich into ATC-sized cards. These I overlaid (using glue) with transparencies from Artchix's Grow Blossoms sheet. Four of them covered the ATCs completely while the other 2 did a partial job. Onto this background I glued the ladies and on top went the Art Flourishes transparencies, again some covering the entire ATC and other only partially, including one where I just used the word Flourish from the sheet.

Then I zigzag stitched around all the edges of all the ATCs using gold thread and then the final embellishments were added in the form of text (from vintage quotation books), corner ornaments and heart brads (both also from Artchix).

Above you can see the finished 6 cards and underneath the one I like best in more details.