A is for Antoinette

Ever since I made the decision to not accept any more bookings for talks and workshops in order to have more time for my own work and also to spend some time just "playing", the workshops and talks that I have done, in both Northern and Southern Ireland and yesterday in Hamilton, were so lovely that I was tempted to change my mind!! But no, I know I need more time to concentrate on my large quilts and simply to give myself thinking time so I will have to train myself to say no. Rather ironic then, that I'm reading a self-help book (see the side bar on the right) which is urging us to say Yes, but in a sense saying no means saying yes in my case. Yes to more me-time!!

After seeing everyone stitching away merrily in Hamilton, my fingers were literally itching to do the same when I arrived home and today I indulged by making my ATCs for the Rosey Marie swap on the site I recently joined dedicated to Marie Antoinette as well as making an ATC for a new project I have started: Alphabet ATCs. Yes, indeed that means I've finished my 100 ATC project and I'll show you no. 100 in the very near future!

Marie Antoinette has very romantic connotations for many people, myself included, despite her tragic end, and of course, she herself was a romantic par excellence. In this swap we were asked to combine her with roses, which proved an irrssistable attraction to me, so today I spend some happy hours making a fabric collage on Fast2Fuse, using a variety of rose fabrics. I added different Marie Antoinette images which I had printed on self-adhesive cotton sheets (from Crafty Computer Paper), adding hand and machine stitching and covering the entire ATCs with French writing transparencies. The cards were finished by ironing another rose fabric to the back of the ATCs, adding pink zig-zag stitching around the edges and finally adding size 11 seed beads by hand.

The first card for my Alphabet ATCs is also dedicated to Marie and is called A is for Antoinette. It was made in the same way as described above with the addition of a transparent A (from Altered Pages). I'll be adding the actual letters to every Alphabet ATC I make.