Christmas postcards, pt. 2

Here is another of my favourites of this group of postcards. I don't know why I like this one so much - it's very simple - but I really like it quite a lot.

This card started out all green (with the one brown bit in the centre) but then I thought it could use some red to perk it up. And then I realized I'd accidentally left a small hole, so I appliquéd the star to hide it.

Sometimes it seems that the more simple things are, the better I like them. This one is quite plain, but I am pretty happy with the overall look.

Another favourite of mine. I think this is maybe a Courthouse Steps style block. (But I could be wrong.) I accidentally sewed one of the greens on in reverse. Oops. (That's the second time I've done that with that fabric.)

And another which I find strangely delightful. I think it's the bright splash of orange.

Christmas postcards

This year for Christmas I decided to participate in a recipe exchange online, where 10 of us got together and sent each other a postcard with a recipe printed on the back. Because I'm stupidly ambitious sometimes, I decided to do mine on fabric postcards, rather than just regular postcards of my city or whatever.

This first card is one of my favourites of the group. As I mentioned in my last entry, I like playing with the colours of Christmas, without being too explicitly Christmas, so this (and the other cards) works out well for me. A kind of wonky log cabin.

These trees are a bit ubiquitous with me this particular Christmas season...

And another! (The last one, thankfully.)

Just a kind of crazy quilt type card, with random placement of all the colours and prints.

This is my least favourite of the cards, as it was kind of a failed concept. The idea was a Christmas present with a big bow across the top, but most people seem to be confused by it and think it's some sort of elf costume, but then wonder why you can't see the rest of the elf.

Anyway, it originally was going to be part of a pillow with three gift boxes in a row, which I think would have worked a little better, if there were a series rather than just one, but I was paper piecing it and got tired of dealing with the paper bits and turned it into a card instead.

Christmas pillows

Pillows seem always to be a small, nice thing I can hand-make for people at Christmas time. They're both time and cost-effective and they're cute, too. This'll be the second year I've given away a small mountain of pillows to family at Christmas. And I think it'll have to be one of the last times. Nobody needs 50 different holiday pillows. (Or Do They? Hmm...)

This first one, in blues, is actually a kit I picked up at one of my least favourite fabric stores in Calgary. I always seemed to have bad experiences when I shopped there - mainly being ignored and/or eyed up as if I was going to smear dirty fingers all over everything, usually both simultaneously - but it's the only quilt store that's very accessible to me by transit. And this most recent visit when I picked up the kit was a welcome change - I was greeted, had an offer of help, and after refusing help was left alone until I was ready to go.

Another problem I often have with this particular quilt store is that I find their fabric selection is often a little bit... stodgy. I mean, it's just quite obvious that whoever does the buying has a very different eye than I do. On the other hand, the next nearest store is another 30-40 minutes away by transit. So I deal.

In any case, the blue pillow is going to be for my grandma, as I thought she might like a more muted palette than I'd typically prefer. And if she wishes, she can leave the pillow on the couch year round, since there's nothing too excessively Christmas about it, more just wintery.

I picked out the fabric myself for these two pillows, so they're a bit more my style. I like the green/red combination like this, where the colours aren't quite the typical green and red of Christmas decorations. And again, the prints aren't quite Christmas, while still being Christmasy. I haven't quite decided who is getting these pillows. My Christmas is very much up in the air - we don't really know exactly who is and isn't coming from the family, so depending who makes the trip out, that'll be who they go home with, I guess.

Holiday Week - Day Four

My days off are coming to an end, far too soon. There is today, of course, and sort of Saturday/Sunday, but really this is kind of it. And I've made tentative plans to spend most of today with a friend.

Anyway, this block is one of the first things I finished yesterday - the December block for my Block of the Month group. I think this is my favourite of the three blocks so far. The orange still drags the print down so that it hardly stands out, but in general, I think it's got a better balance between the good fabrics and the bad. The burgundy doesn't look quite so dingy.

i haven't edited the photos yet for them, but I also made 6 fabric postcards, which is about half of what I'm hoping to get done. They're all Christmasy in theme, though some of them are more Christmas than others. They'll get a separate post all their own, once I'm ready to edit and upload the photos.

And then here is a peak at what the other two tree pillows I made look like. I really prefer the colours in these pillows to the blue one I showed yesterday, but I suspect my grandma would like the more muted blues better. It's entirely possible that once the pillow goes on the couch, it'll never come off (as with the last Christmas pillow I made her), so probably the blue is a better year-round choice as well.

There was a hockey game on tv last night, and I didn't want to disturb my sister and my brother-in-law's watching of it by having the sewing machine going, so I spent a while digging through things until I found the box full of my Sunlight/Shadows blocks. So these are the first 27 of an intended 56. I also discovered that I've got 8 more blocks already cut out and ready to go; I just need to sew them together. Which is pretty fantastic, since I cut out another 5 the other day. Which means that once they're done as well, I'll only need 16 more.

It's quite neat to see them all laid out like this, even without trying to arrange them in any particular way. I really like the way these kind of scrappy things come together when you repeat the pattern.

Holiday Week - Day Three

So yesterday it really felt like I didn't accomplish anything except watching A LOT of Firefly.

Which isn't at all true, but what I did was a lot of stuff that won't show up for probably months or else was for other people. I cut out a stack of charm squares for Just Jenn at Quiddity Quilts, though it probably won't end up in the mail for a week or two. I cut out 2/3s of five Sunlight/Shadows blocks. (I always have the problem with these of not having enough or good enough whites and off-whites and beiges for the neutral part of the square. For a while I was trying to buy them up, but I still don't seem to have anything I want to use.) I cut out a block I intend to make today.

This is one of the things I did work on that I can show you. It's obviously not finished, but I ran into a bit of indecision. It's meant to be a pillow, but I'm wondering if maybe I ought to make it into a wall-hanging instead. Indecision.

After that, I did another two smaller-scale versions of this, with different fabrics, which will be made into pillows (I think they're too small for wall hangings, though maybe not). I haven't fused on the trees yet, so I didn't photograph those. Probably today, though. I definitely prefer the colours I choose to the ones that came in the kit, but probably my grandma will like the blue anyway.

So today's goals?
- tree pillows
- December block for my Block of the Month (I got it early from the organizer)
- start on Christmas postcards

Assorted gift postcards

I made this postcard for a friend's daughter, who recently turned three years old. She wanted to have a monster themed birthday, so I thought it would be fun to send her a monster postcard.

I designed three potential monsters while riding the train home from work one afternoon, and the next day decided on and made this one because I liked the googly eyes and the giant mouth. Maybe one day I'll make the other two, but we'll see.

It sort of reminds me of a lion cub that's not grown up enough to let out a really big roar but keeps trying anyway.

In any case, here is another postcard I made for a different friend, though I made this a handful of years ago, back when I first started trying out fabric postcards. I only just recently finished it when I found it again shoved into a stash of fabric.

The friend I made this card for used to have an icon on her livejournal of a lemon-pig and this was my attempt to recreate it.

I didn't finish it then because I made a rookie mistake with the fusible web - I fused it on the right rather than the wrong side of the fabric. It's not especially noticeable with the yellow because it was a batik, but the orange feet and the green ears are much more pale than they would be if I'd done it properly.

I decided that it's cute enough, even with its errors, that it needed to be finished, so I added a back and sewed it all up. I think it's maybe one of my favourite postcards ever.

Varga Girl Postcards, Pt. 2

These are the last six Varga Girl cards that I created for my Art2Mail exchange. These cards taught me a lot, by the end, about what sorts of shapes and movements work well in silhouette and what doesn't. I think I didn't really think about how shapes translate without the shading that you get in a normal photograph and the loss of detail.

This card is a pretty good example of that, I think. In the original artwork, what you see is a woman with her arm bent back, as if she's scratching her shoulder, but here it looks almost as if she's got an arm amputated at the elbow. She's also wearing a skirt, but her legs look awkward because you don't see anything to define that big blob below her waist. I maybe should have treated her as if she were nude or in a bathing suit and cut in a gap to show the shape of her folded in leg. This one was also a good object lesson in colour - I should have given her a hat that would stand out more against the background, rather than making the flower stand out against the hat. It would have had more impact if she'd worn, for instance, a white hat with a purple flower. Still, I like it. The more I look at some of these cards I'm not totally sold on, the more I like them and am less bothered by these flaws that I can mention.

The thing that I was most scared of with these cards was that they'd come out looking tacky. Like the silhouettes you sometimes see on mudflaps for trucks, all massive chests and tiny waists and not much artistry. This card most reminds me of the mudflap girls because of her position, but I love this card too much to see too strong of a comparison.

This girl is the most plain Jane of my Vargas girls, which a little bit funny because I remember the original being quite saucy. I fought with this fabric for a long while, getting the girl's body to follow the line of flowers. She originally had a white flower in her hair, but it blended too much with the background, so I pulled it off. She needs some sort of spark to make her more visually interesting, so it's a shame about the flower.

Another girl who lost her floral embellishments. I should have put a ribbon in her hair or a flower. Ah well, she's lovely anyway.

Another of the awkwardly shaped girls who taught me about silhouettes. She also taught me that in some respects, Varga didn't have a terribly clear idea about how bodies bend, because I've never managed to recreate that particular arm movement. Her bent back arm looks almost like a large brimmed hat, rather than an arm, and I think I like that explanation. I so love thte fabric in the background of this. Gorgeous.

Here is another of my very subdued, quiet seeming cards. Like in the other card with a floral background, I had to fight to get my girl to stand/sit in just the right position. I didn't want either girl to look as if she were farting flowers. For all its quietness, I've loved this card since i first got a good look at it.

It was a little bit sad to leave my Varga girls behind when I moved on to my final collection of cards. I think they turned out amazingly well. I've had more requests for the woman in the polka dot sweater than I quite know what to do. If only they didn't take so long to sew.

Varga Girl Postcards

My second series of postcards for my Art2Mail exchange was of 1940s pin-ups, in particular Alberto Vargas pin-ups. I think his pin-ups are such iconic images. For many people, I think he's what people think of when they think of old pin-ups. Beautiful, coy women who are sexy but not in an especially overt way. Of course Vargas did do nudes as well and there is definitely a range from baring very little to baring everything. I didn't use any of his nudes, but even if I had, I don't think you'd be able to tell, with these silhouettes.

I found this particular image of a woman sunbathing surprisingly difficult to execute. Somehow I made my template too large, so I had to resize her feet. I completely flubbed her fingers. And then, too, my attempt to stitch on the bathing suit (if you click through the photo, you can see a larger version of the image which shows more detail) was only somewhat successful. I thought this very basic shape would be so easy, but... not so much. I love, still, the blue background because it looks almost like water, like she could be lying at the beach or beside a pool and thinking about something cold and sweet to drink.

This is another card where my attempts to stitch a bit more form into her body came out only so so. It's not bad at all, I don't think, but a bit awkward around her bum and the size/shape of her left leg. Anyway, I liked the fabric I found in my stash for her hair. I'm not sure anyone else I showed this too was very fond of the brown, but I thought the kind of variance in colour was nice for giving her hair more depth.

Oh, this one is so lovely, I think. I just love how sort of delicate everything is - the fine stripes on the background, the bouquet of flowers, even her pose.

One of my favourites. I love the bright background colour on this one and her pose. In the original, she's holding a very large feathered pen, but I didn't want to try to recreate the shape or texture so I just left it out. Her fingers are a bit awkward with nothing to hold, but I think it works anyway.

This is my favourite of the bunch; I think she's gorgeous. The white pops so beautifully off the red, and I think there's something old-school and perfect about her wearing (taking off? or putting on?) a polka-dot sweater; it seems for me to reflect the time-period these images came from, even if polka dots weren't really in fashion then.

For this card, I wanted something in sort of light and breezy colours, like a windy spring day. I liked the yellow and green together up until I actually fused the hat on and I find it a little bit... meh. The hat, unfortunately, didn't take shape terribly well. (It really needed the depth of shadows.) It doesn't have quite the same pop that the pink and red cards have, but I love her shape and the implied movement of the wind.

Gifts from Grandma

This past weekend my 90 year old grandma came up to visit my sister and I and she brought two quilts with her. This one is a sampler quilt she made for me. (She never has gotten away from the idea that girls should have quilts in pastels. I think every quilt I've got from her has pastel sashing and borders. My sister always gets the reds, but only because my sister is willing to say that she wants something other than pink and I can't be anything but grateful that she'll make anything for me at all - so much work goes into it, how can I tell her to make something in a bold blue or a charcoal or something stronger anyway than Easter pastels?)

A lot of the colours and patterns aren't things I could imagine doing myself, but they're so very much what my grandma does and has always done. Even though I'm a little bit frightened of Sunbonnet Sue (Has anyone done a sort of... Brothers Grimm version of Sunbonnet Sue, with wolves peeking out of the bonnets and bloody axes dripping behind the sweetly-dressed girls' backs?) this is so much a product of my grandma's sort of quilting style, the time she came from and using up all the scraps and all those sorts of things, that I can't help but love it and find it amazing and so much more special than something I could bang out in a weekend and have look perfectly polished.

This is the quilt she brought for my sister - all done in redwork, which looks so amazing. She used to do a bit of blackwork and we've got some of that downstairs in our house, but it's quite beautiful to see it done in colour and made into a quilt, rather than just a framed piece of embroidery.

Rumour has it that she's working on another quilt each for my sister and I. I can't quite imagine how she does all this, when she's almost completely blind in one eye - it's all hand sewn and then hand quilted in her chilly basement on her homemade frame. (My grandpa made her a frame out of saw horses, c-clamps, and two by fours.) She's been making quilts for all the grandkids this last little while. I wish I'd asked to see what she'd made for my BC cousins, but perhaps those ones aren't finished yet.

Stampede Postcards

For my Art2Mail postcard exchange, I decided to do a couple of series of postcards (as well as the Doctor Who card I posted earlier). The first series, because we started up our exchange just as Calgary Stampede 2008 was about to start, I decided would be cowboys. I've done cowboy postcards in the past, so it feels a little bit like it's just my thing now. I like the image, even though I'm not all that interested in cowboy culture or the West or whatever.

Because I wanted the cards to have something to do with the actual Calgary Stampede, I bought up newspapers during Stampede week so that I could mine them for interesting photographs and images of cowboys that I could turn into silhouettes for the cards. So each of these images actually comes directly out of local papers. I wish I'd kept notes on what was happening in the cards that came from photos of actual people.

This card isn't based on a picture of a real person during the Stampede, but came from a graphic in the newspaper. I found the real photographs surprisingly difficult to work with because often parts of the scene would be blurred out or cut off so that only the most interesting part was showing, but to make them into silhouettes, it often made unrecognizable shapes of the animals. (The card following this is an example of that.)

I've had a lot of mixed reviews about this card. I've been told it looks like a whale with a dog sitting on its tail. I've been told it looks like a turtle with a teddy bear on its head. I've been told it looks like a blob. I think it could look a bit like a Rorschach blot, if only I'd done a mirror image.

I think I knew too well what the picture was to see what the postcard looks like. It is actually a cowboy wrestling a steer. He's got his arm wrapped around the steer's head, with one of the horns rising up between the cowboy's arm and body. The actual image blurred out the steer's legs and tail and the angle the animal was standing at, in reference to the camera, really shortened the body so that it turned into a big blob. It was, if nothing else, a good exercise in looking at the shape of an image, rather than the image itself. At least if I'm intending to make a silhouette out of it.

And then finally there is this card. One of the things that I was trying to do with this series was to use backgrounds made of fabrics that felt sort of country to me - wheat or things that might have been shirting material or something. I think this card was the least successful, but I was running out of options in my stash. (Or at least running out of options that were in large enough sizes to make into cards.) It seems a little too much like an ocean fabric or something, rather than something cowboy-esque. Ah well. The shape of the cowboy itself is quite interesting, so I think it's excusable.

Who? postcard

I mentioned in my last entry that I'd joined a quilted postcard exchange, one that is set up through Art2Mail. I'm not sure how long Art2Mail has been around, but my exchange group was the 49th, so it must have been going for a while. I don't think I'd realized that fabric postcards were quite such a common thing in the quilting world, but I suppose I am very much on the outskirts of things - I don't read any of the magazines or often go to shows or belong to any groups. I haven't even been to a quilt store in months.

At any rate, a friend joined the same exchange, so I decided to make something special for her - a Doctor Who postcard, since we're both fans of the show. I found the base image on some colouring pages that the BBC put out. (See them here.)

The tough thing with this card was figuring out where to stitch in the clothing. I didn't draw on any of the lines, just started sewing and hoped things would come out more or less where they needed to. Some of it didn't work out so well, but on the whole, I think the errors blend in well enough that you don't really notice them.

I wish I could have figured out how to give him a face, a basic one at least, but I think anything I could have done would have come out a little bit too cartoony. (I also wish I wouldn't have forgotten the part of his coat that hangs behind the leg propped on the rock, but nobody ever notices that it's missing unless I point it out.)

Fabric Postcards

It's been nearly a year since I updated here, which is a shame for two reasons. First, I just haven't been sewing that much. I do go through stages with sewing, but it was a very, very long off stage for me. Depressingly, distressingly long. But it was largely because I was distressed and depressed for a lot of the time. So.

Second, I kept forgetting to update, even when I did sew. And I've gotten to a lot of intermediary stages on things, but mainly on things I didn't want to update on until they were finished. So I've got this entire quilt put together, but I can't figure out how to quilt or tie it, so I've just not finished it. And there's another quilt that I don't even have any photos of any longer, which is finished but needs to be sandwiched and tied or quilted. And then there's ANOTHER quilt which is sandwiched, but I'm not any good at quilting, so I haven't finished it. One of these days. Maybe.


In any case, I joined an exchange for fabric postcards. I thought something small like that, 4x6 quilts, would be a good way to break myself back into the quilting habit. This card wasn't for the exchange, but it's the first one I'd made after a long while of not doing anything, and just before I started up making cards again.

This particular card was a thank you to my boss's wife, who helped me out with some scrapbooking stuff. I must have been feeling a little crazy when I made it because the colours are so bright and the quilting completely insane. But I like it: it's so bright and cheerful.