A little bit of art on the sewing table

My little sewing table is in use again as something other than a photography surface (which it has served as admirably, being the only flat white surface in the house before I finally got my jewelry-making cutting boards out of storage): Today I worked on some ATCs. That's artist trading cards, for anyone who didn't know — now you do. Hopefully I'll be making more of them in the coming months so no one will be able to forget. ;)

The ATCs in question are actually for a fiber arts art group, so it seemed natural to make them on the sewing table. Plus, I have a chair that's the right height for the sewing table, and if I'd tried to use the crafting table I mentioned in the last post as having been cleaned off, I'd have had to stand. We can't have that! Well, maybe when the area under it is organized enough to be interesting instead of tiresome. For today, the sewing desk was happy to be used again for actual craft work.


The theme for this ATC swap is "lost and found," which translates to: Use found objects on your cards. I ended up using old yarn scraps, old fabric scraps, and a piece of ribbon saved from some gift packaging. Originally I wanted to make three ATCs, but making art degenerated into fighting with the sewing machine, which is still not quite up to snuff even after I cleaned all the accumulated sewing dust out of it (was that last year?) — so I ended up just making one. I ... need to make more ATCs. I am sadly out of practice. But here's the one that came out fibery enough for me to feel comfortable using it in the swap:


Incidentally, no, I have not yet figured out the correct white balance setting for this particular lighting situation. ;)
The first mate says it looks like a decorated jeans pocket, which I think is appropriate for a fiber-arts-ish ATC. And did you see that I made a tiny little loomy square and wove my green yarn scrap into it? If you want to be nice, that's three fiber arts techniques in one spot: I sewed the gold loom warp threads onto the card (I don't want to call it warping, since I did it with a needle ;)), plied the leftover green cotton thread, and then needle-wove it into the warp. There's also some machine stitching on the rest of the card, which was where I got sadly derailed into fighting with the machine.

Alas, my poor machine. I do love it, and I need to take it in to the shop — maybe the arts and crafts fairies will leave money in my shoe tonight so I can take it to be looked at.

Anyway, I did end up finishing the other two ATCS as non-fibery-themed ones. Someday I may feel brave enough to offer them up for trade. Anyone else out there do mail art? :D

More catchup

Mail in:

*Calming Waters

There's some other stuff I have evilly not noted, too, but it's sitting in my car on the passenger seat where I can't miss it.

Still catching up on swappage today since Friday was spent cleaning and doing every piece of laundry I could find, then we spent all weekend in Daytona doing more grandparent-house cleanout, spending time with Brian's family, and chasing the sun, by which I mean we managed to see the sunrise on the east coast and the sunset on the west coast, which Brian has been talking about doing since we first got together. :D

I sent the blue postcard swap, theoretically, on Saturday when I dropped the postcards into the drop box at the condo. Today I'm going to send the "Surf the net with me" swap, including this little ATC as an extra goodie:



Oh, and I picked up some things for the Tiny Box of Joy at Brian's grandparents', but intelligently, I forgot to take them out of the box and bring them with me to package up and send. Oops. Well, there's always tomorrow...

More art: Orient puzzle piece and Zetti ATC, plus a spinny challenge

This month's spinny challenge on Spindlitis is spinning non-wool fibers. Hmm. I do have a bunch of non-wool fibers sitting around waiting for me to do something with them ... but I can't yet, since I'm on that UFO diet. ;)

Anyway, here's some more art I sent out today. One is that puzzle piece for a travel-themed puzzle to raise money for Robin, and the other is an attempt at Zetti-esque art for part of my Secret Spring Bunny swap.





I'm not entirely sure what "Zetti" actually means, but I based my attempt on what I got when I searched for "Zetti" on Flickr and Google, and tried to keep it something I actually liked at the same time. ;)

New art: charity fat book pages and old box ATCs

Here's the latest batch of old box ATCs for the swap on Swap-bot:



Since being disappointed with the whinging and negativity over there, I've signed up for virtually no swaps, and I'm not currently participating in the latest Old Box ATC swap, but I still have a bunch of boxes saved up to maybe do old box ATCs with, for myself. :D

Also, I finally got around to doing those fat book pages for Robin's charity fundraising. There are two fat books being put together, one on a nature theme, and the other on a tea theme. Pardon the crappyweird color stuff on the nature themed one; the original was actually worse, if you can believe it, and I didn't really finish tinkering with the color, but I got impatient and wanted to upload it. Yay, impatience. ;)





I'm going to send some ATCs along for an ATC binder that will also be auctioned off for Robin. These are the ones that are going, one called "Butterfly Wing Spring" that I did last year, and the middle one in the bottom set, which was made for a hand-carved stamp ATC swap:






Oh, and I dyed some roving over the weekend with Kool-Aid packets that my lovely Spring Bunny partner sent me. I think they were Berry Blue flavor, or something like that. ;)



I was thinking of trying to blend it with the gray formerly-spinning-bell batt that came off my carder once I gave up on the Columbia for a bit. I'm not sure how well the ridiculously bright blue will do with the dark gray, but I'll do a test batch on my hand carders first, I think. Mmm, blending excitement.

Brainfogged

Again! I made two bookmarks, scanned those and the purple postcards, stuffed a couple envelopes for the I (heart) books swap, and wrote the survey-letter for a getting to know you letter swap on Swapbot, and now I'm a little brainfogged and would like to take a break from slogging through the list of things to do for other people and potentially do something for myself.

Last week (was it last week?) I worked on my experimental knitted, felted tricorn. I felted something on purpose for the first time a couple of days ago, first attempting to do it by hand, but that was too slow, so I finished it in Brian's washing machine, which worked quite nicely, except that the dish soap I was instructed to use didn't seem to want to go away in the rinse cycle. ;) I like felting, so now I have something to do with scritchy wool that I don't want to wear on my skin. Yay. So that was my thing to do for myself the last time I had this question.

Today I still ought to package up my Old Box ATCs for that swap. It isn't required for the swap that I embellish them any further than they are embellished by their own surface design, so I refuse to allow myself to feel pressured into embellishment. If it occurs to me while putting contact info stickers on the back that I should embellish them somehow, then cheers. But if I just put them into envelopes the way they are, then that's fine, too, because it explicitly gives me that permission in the swap info.