Blooming

If spring is not coming to Macbiehill yet, there is only one solution! We'll have to bring it there ourselves, and this lovely bouquet of tulips and daffodils certainly does the trick for me. They really lift the spirit and promise more to come!

Spring is definitely in the air in my various Yahoo groups and there are a variety of Spring themed swaps going on. I'm hosting one on Vintage Spring ATCs on the ATCsforAll site and there is also a Spring ATC swap being organized on the Alpha Stamps Yahoo Group.

I signed up for it already, simply could not control my clicking finger and I was also inspired by the lucite flowers recently added to the Alpha Stamps inventory. As you can see there and now also on this blog I was only too happy to make a sample ATC using them. This one consists of a fabric-paper collage incorporating vintage images, to which I added the image of the lady from the Alpha Stamps Shakespeare #1 fabric collage sheet.

I did some machine stitching on the ATC, and then spend a considerable amount of time adding french knots by hand in a variegated yarn. The ATC then had a bit of a rest period as I felt it needed something else but could not think what that was till I received the lucite flowers from Alpha Stamps and they were just that je ne sais quoi I knew I wanted. The final touch was the text: Left blooming alone.