Fabric Postcard Swap

In February, I participated in a fabric post card swap. The swap was a no stress swap which means you complete your cards before you sign up. That way should your experiment be an epic fail or life conspire to ambush you, you can bow out without feeling guilty. Since that is usually my big hang up with swaps, I was excited to participate. I'd never made fabric postcards before, but since the moderator suggested that this was a good way to experiment with things you had been wanting to try, I decided to test out a few ideas that had been on a slow burn in my brain for far too long.

I began with this technique, which essentially lets you create your own fabric.

This picture shows one of the pieces prior to trimming it down to size and washing out the stabilizer.


One I had my fabric created, I cut squares of a fleece blanket to use as batting and quilted the two together. For the quilting, my inspiration was a post on sketchy quilting I had seen once. To punch up the shapes (and because I can't resist text) I added words to each piece and then trimmed them down to size.



Deciding they still needed a little something, I opted to bind them in a great dark grey on black tonal print.



I also chose to glue the binding to my cardstock backing. Not such a bright idea. Not only was it more difficult to work with because of the short working time of the glue but binding such a small piece when paper has such sharp corners...let's just say my binding was far from perfect.



Of course, the best part was watching the cards come rolling into my mailbox!



The one on the bottom right suffered a broken bead, but otherwise everything went through the mail fine. I've heard back from several of the people who received my cards and they all arrived intact, hurrah!

I love the variety and have an ingenious plan all devised to display them in my craft room. Now I just need to implement it. : )