Art Blast ATC Swap

After teaching yesterday and spending most of last week starting to quilt another large quilt I decided to give myself a treat today by making some ATCs for ourstanding swaps. It's how I keep myself motivated!

The first one on my list was the Art Blast ATC Swap run by Artchix Studio. This swap is inspired by 2 of the Artchix Art Blast cards and had to use images from a selection of Artchix collage sheets but for the rest it was entirely up to you how to interpret the theme.

I used one of my fabric/paper collages as background. It has a lot of red and green and looks spring-like to me. Red was also one of the colours in the inspiration cards to that seemed to fit, the other card had a bird on it so that was what decided me to use images from the Fly Little Bird on the cards.

I cut out the different bird images and used a different one on each cards, after I had layered the background with felt to make the stitching easily and give some body to the cards. I overlaid all the cards with images (already ATC sized) from the Spring Blossom transparency card. As the background collage already had a lot of french text incorporated in it, I selected more French text from a vintage book for each card: Vive le bon roy (long live the good king), tout doucement (very gently), dans la foret (in the forest), tous les etes (all the summers), and un petit homme brun (a little brown man).

The cards were then sewn onto watercolour ATC blanks (also from Artchixstudio) after I had antiqued the edges with Walnut Stain inkpad.

As you can see this last ATC, which is my favourite, I think, at least at the moment, is a photo rather than a scan as it has a very 3D crown which does not scan well. More ATCs coming up very soon!