Outgoing: Fabric Postcards

I don't know why, but I forgot in my previous entry about swapping fabric postcards to include the name/location of the swap group. It can be found here on Livejournal. I've just opened up a poll there today to see when people would like to swap again, which I'm hoping will end up at the end of May (though I know one person at least is ready to do a swap pretty much immediately). The way I prefer to run the swap is a No Stress Swap, which means that everyone knows the end date in advance, makes what they want to make, and then signs up AFTER they've completed everything. Swap partners are arranged once sign-ups are over and that way no one gets flaked on.

Anyway, these are the postcards I mailed off in this past round.

Pennants postcard a photo by hold your spin on Flickr.

This was really my favourite postcard that I made. It started out with an idea one day when a co-worker was talking about looking for Buddhist prayer flags, and that got me google image searching photos of prayer flags. What I loved about the photos was the pop of colours against the bright blue sky, so I recreated that with pennants (since I don't know enough about Buddhism to be comfortable making representations of prayer flags). It's definitely a look that's been done in a lot of ways - when I searched flickr, I found pillows and mini-quilts galore - but it's just so beautiful. I frayed the edges of the pennants in hopes of making them look old and weather-beaten.

Elephants postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

My next card was this elephant card, featuring snippets of Tip Top elephants fabric. I had this idea in mind based on the video for the Metric song Stadium Love, which features animals going head to head in combat. There was a long time between my seeing the video and making the card, so actually they haven't really got anything to do with one another in terms of appearance, but it's pretty cute anyway.

Sunrise or a Sunset postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

Another favourite, for its simplicity mainly. I was pulling apart a roll of 2.5" strips of solids from Connecting Threads and the colours, which are possibly maybe their spring collection, reminded me of a sunrise (or a sunset) and so that's what I set out to create.

*Ticker Tape 1 postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

One of the nice things about the ticker tape style is that you can use small scraps of fabric and also scraps where the pattern doesn't allow for a seam allowance, as with this swimming sister from the Mendocino fabric or the octopus from the same line. To set those pieces into something else, would have lost too much of the pattern, so it was great to get to use them in something like this. I didn't take a photo of the back, but I used paper on the reverse of this card, which had stripes of colour in pink and purple, so that's where the colour inspiration for the front of the card came from.

Ticker Tape 2 postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

The back side of this ticker tape card is a paper in blue and purple, so those were the colours I used for the front. My favourite bits on this card are the Tufted Tweets chair and of course the gorgeous owl. As an experiment in the ticker tape style, I'm not sure either of these cards was completely successful, but I think it looks better when you've got a larger area to fill - 4 x 6-in was just not enough to get in a lot of bits and pieces in interesting patterns.

Log Cabin postcard a photo by clumsy chord on Flickr.

This log cabin postcard wasn't created for the exchange, but I made it at the same time, so that I could make a video of my process of postcard making, and I also sent it away at approximately the same time.

For the video, which is embedded below, I wanted to make something pretty simple and classic, so I went with the log cabin, and I did it askew because a log cabin typically comes out square, but a postcard is rectangular, so I didn't want to lose too much of the shape of the log cabin by cutting off the top and bottom logs. I really love this card - I think it came out beautifully.

This isn't a terribly good video - I don't have any way of recording myself at work, so I had to record bits talking about what I was going to do, then stop recording so that I could do it, and then show what I'd done. It's also by no stretch of the imagination the definitive word on making fabric postcards. Its how I make them, but I'm self-taught so there are probably several other possibly better ways of going about it.