Bearded man ATC

My honours thesis is due in under three months, so expect a lot of procrastination crafting!

This afternoon, in between readings on survey-based experimental research via the web, I whipped up a Frankie Magazine ATC for a Send Something letter. Isn't the picture of the bearded guy awesome? It's made by the lovely lady over at the handmade romance blog.

I definitely need to carve a rubber stamp for the back of ATCs... could be a bit fiddly though!

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Related post: Magazine collage ATCs

Magazine Collage ATCs

Hot on the heels of my junk mail collages, I participated in a Magazine Collage ATC Swap over on swap-bot.

I spent a while poring over old Frankie Magazines to find inspiration, which wasn't hard because it's full of cute and quirky backgrounds, drawings, photos & articles :)

The process went something like this:

1. Rip out magazine pages with interesting pics
2. Carefully cut out around individual pics with an exacto knife & cut out various background prints
   
3. Spend an hour or so rearranging all the little pieces around on a blank ATC until happy with the arangement
4. Desperately try and glue all the pieces down whilst keeping them in place
5. Look at all the bits and pieces which didn't make the cut... and repeat steps 3&4
   

As you can see in the pics above, I actually cut out an ATC-sized piece from the magazine's cover to use as the 'blank' canvas.


And we all know I'm a sucker for coordination, so the card & envelope also had to be made from Frankie magazine cut-outs!

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• Related post: Tutorial: envelopes from recycled paper

Flower person ATC

I must admit, I was a little stumped for this ATC. I took it as a challenge to myself - that's what I like about Swap-bot: other people think of the ideas, then you have a deadline to do them by. It's what makes the difference, for me, between thinking "oh, I'd like to do that one day" to "you need to do this now, and make it good because it's going out to somebody!"

Anyway, the swap stipulated the following:

The idea here is to use a flower, be it stamped, prima type, paper etc etc, and put a face in the middle and give it a body and have a beautiful little flower person.

I had some lovely flower stickers I wanted to use, but was a little bit apprehensive about the body.

In the end, I traced a baby picture from a book I picked up at Abbey's bookshop: Anatomy and Drawing, by Victor Perard.

Ideally I'll be drawing my own figures, but I'm not quite ready yet. So I traced the picture in pencil, and then went over it in a felt-tip pen. I wasn't sure how I was going to colour it - it didn't look right in b&w. Then I remembered how at school we'd make old-looking "parchment" by rubbing a wet teabag on paper.

So I wet a teabag in a small amount of hot water, squeezed most of the water out, and dabbed the picture with it. It made the felt ink run a little, which I liked - otherwise I could have done the pen outline afterwards. For good measure, I dipped my finger into the instant coffee jar and dotted them around the wet picture, which left little brown spots. To stop the paper curling, I placed it between 2 sheets of paper and left it to dry under a heavy book.

I recently picked up some blank ATC cards at Eckersley's Art & Craft store, which has made life much easier. For my last ATC, I used some cardstock I had lying around, but my cutting was a little wonky. Anyway, I used some green scrapbooking papers for the background, and... voilà! Not exactly Ann Geddes, but still!

One-Day Swap

I made this ATC for the One-Day Swap at swap-bot.

The original sketch was for a dotee doll, but I didn't have enough nice fabrics to pull it off. However, after spreading all of my craft supplies out all over the floor to take stock of my supplies (they're all still scattered about, ahem), I decided that I had enough appropriate paper scraps to give an ATC a go.

ATCs are a concept that, like dotees, I had not come across before joining swap-bot. So this is my very first ATC. I'm still not comfortable with my drawing skills, preferring to do simple collage-type things for now.

You can't really tell from the scanned image, but the ATC is layered:

• The red hat-band & dress are made from corrugated red cardboard
• The hat itself is made from textured black cardboard. The brim stands out, because I stuck a piece of felt under it.
• The "button" is a "flat" wooden bead
• The face is made of felt, with embroidered eyes & mouth.
• The fringe is also made from felt, but the hair that hangs down is braided embroidery thread (they move around freely)
• The shawl's fringe is green Yarn
• The shawl and hills are made from some scrapbooking paper & the sky was cut out of an advertising catalogue

I love all the different textures & recycling all the scraps of paper & material I have been hoarding for what feels like an eternity!