Art In the Cards Trading Group

I was invited to join an ATC group a few months back and you have seen the pieces that I have done. Well now we are doing a blog so that you can see what the whole group is doing. Some pretty amazing pieces are coming out of such a tiny group! We will be starting with our All Cracked Up theme and going forward from there. I am thinking we should post our other pieces too because they are amazing!! Anyway, here is the link if you want to check it out!

http://artsinthecards.blogspot.com/

Cracked

So our artist trading card group had another challenge and the theme was Cracked. Hmmm. I decided I was going to do mine based on the Crack of Dawn!

So I used backings from a previous failed ATC attempt. I painted the fabric midnight blue and then went back into it with shiva paintstiks in yellow, orange and green. I sewed around the "clouds" to add more definition. I then drew on some yupo paper with colored pencils and ink. Once dry, I painted over it with gel medium in three layers. Once dry, I used gel medium to adhere it to the backing. It wasn't as transparent as I wanted. So I had to add more details back in with fabric dye pens. It has a rubbery feel to it and was hard to sew the edges to finish off the piece. The 6:08 is the time my husband keeps waking me up for some reason!

Rebirth Challenge piece

Well I have finished the third piece in our 12"x 12" challenge series. The theme this time was Rebirth and it could be interpreted any way we wanted. I created mine based on the butterfly. When the challenge word was revealed, we had just received our caterpillars at the preschool and we watched each day as they got bigger and then went into the cocoon stage.

I found some great fabric my friend Christine had given me and used it for the background. I quilted around the piece to give the feel of tree bark. I used rust dyed and hand dyed fabric to create tree branches. The leaves were two fabrics fused together and then cut out to look like leaves. The cocoon was from more fabric my friend Christine gave me - she thought it looked like mud and I of course said I would take it! I added some angelina fiber over the top and machine quilted it to add more texture. I then stuffed it with fiber. I created the butterfly wings by fusing to pieces of white fabric together and then drawing in the wing patterns using fabric markers. The edges were faced so there would not be a border (I hate making borders if you haven't noticed!! LOL)