A more detailed view

By popular demand (!) here are a few close-ups of the Artchix Twinchies which I posted yesterday as some people wanted to have a better view of them. I'm still busily beading my quilt today, while outside yet more snow is coming down in a steady stream.

It's very cosy sitting inside looking out and Scotland is a lot better at dealing with these sort of conditions as "them in the south" (overheard in a shop) but nevertheless I'm just happy to stay put and admire it from the warmth of our home.

Colourful Artchix Twinchies

While the cold shimmered on outside I retreated to my studio to make twinchies for an Artchix Studio swap. We could make either 6 or 12 and as there are wonderful twinchies in the photoalbum of the Yahoo Artchix Group already, which I would love to receive in return, I went all out and made the full 12.

The only requirement was that we used images from one of the Artchix Studio sheets dedicated to colours and apart from one twinchie, which uses an image from Tangerine Travels, all my inchies use images from Happy Yellow.

I used backgrounds left over from various fabric/paper collages, cut to 2 x 2" size and layered them them felt. I then glued on the images and overlaid the twinchies with the transparency images (from Enchanted Garden Artchix Studio sheet) , mostly covering the twinchies completely and sometimes partially only. I looked in my quotation books for suitable texts which were vintaged up with gold metallic rub-on. I added watercolour paper to the back of the twinchies and zigzag stitched around the edges with gold thread.

To my immense surprise John took a look at them and for the first time ever he insisted that I keep one which you can see underneath. So I made another one to swap and this one, called In her Grave, will remain here. I must add that it was also my favourite although I had not mentioned that to him at all and I was already having palpitations about sending it away. What a great co-incidence!

Artchix Twinchies

Time for some art now after all the nature views. I've made some 2" squares pieces, called twinchies in the trade, for an Artchix swap. It's not due till September but I've now almost caught up with my to-do list so before tackling the quilting on a fairly large quilt I'm trying to make sure these swaps are not getting overlooked.

The only requirement apart from the size was to use images from Artchix Spoil me sheet and I've used both the transparency as well as the actual collage sheet on paper.

For the background I used a paper/fabric collage which features paper napkins on which there are chocolates, teacups and pots and cupcakes. All the images used are naturally from Artchix. The delicious chocolate German scrap trim is also from them.

I wanted the squares to look like little delectable chocolates themselves so they were finished with beading along the sides, using pink and brown size 11 seed beads.