A Catch-Up Post about some ATC Exchanges

This is a little bit of a catch-up post about some ATCs trades.  I belong to Surface Design Group and recently participated in a Metallic Theme ATC Exchange with a group of people located in the US, Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia.  Their ATCs have started to arrive and I think most have received mine, so I thought I would post about the ones I made.

This is a fabric-based group so it is generally preferable to use fabric as an important element in any exchange although there are no restrictions about what else is added!  The colours in the top photo are a lot more accurate than the photo of all nine of them

I had some stretchy very bright green stretchy sequin fabric (I think it is mostly used for dance costumes) which I toned down by painting it with a few coppery and olive shades of Lumiere paint.  It is layered with a felt and then cardboard backing and the metallic embellishments are beads on metallic wires and squares of copper sheet that I heated, cut, embossed and distressed with black paint.  I thought I would make the copper edges less sharp by folding over all the edges but it created a nightmare for my sewing machine when I came to stitch them on!  I eventually finished them although by sewing some of them on by hand because I got so tired of the thread being cut on the metal.

I also belong to a Beeswax Collage group and a small group of us are exchanging "bee" themed beeswaxed ATCs.  I had to join that one seeing as my name (Deborah) is Hebrew for bee.  My ATCs turned out quite a bit darker than I intended as I wasn't thinking about how much a black background would darken the dictionary book page once it was covered in beeswax and made semi-transparent.  I have stamped stencilled, coloured (with inks), machine-stitched, foiled the edges and added a little square sequin and seed bead in the corner.  The orange layer is just background to the scan!

I'll share the ATCs I receive back once they have all arrived.  And now I am off to paint - still inspired by last weekend's workshop and wanting to play while I remember Flora's techniques!