Fabric Postcards

Cloth Paper Scissors Magazine is holding a postcard challenge, due in their offices next Friday. I knew I wanted to send them one as soon as I read about it in their Nov/Dec issue, but of course with all the holiday stuff happening, I put it off until the new year. Luckily I was able to get these completed and mailed today. The lure of having something published in an upcoming issue is too great (even though my pieces are not selected very often - just once - click here to see).

There was no theme for this challenge, so I had kind of a hard time deciding what to make. I came up with the above little character first, with a little poem on the back: "When stormy rains are falling, put on your happy shoes, with a smile as your umbrella, you'll always beat the blues!". I had wanted to simply stamp the words "Let a smile be your umbrella" on the front of the postcard, but I did some research and found out those lyrics are still under copyright, so I went with an original poem instead. The rules of the challenge require the postcard to be at least 50% fabric, and this one is all fabric, and not fabric that I've stamped, painted, bleached or altered in any way. Cloth Paper Scissors is really a magazine about Mixed-Media, and with no real mixing of media in the above postcard, I decided to make a second one, below.
For this one, I used a background of pretty blue batik fabric. Then I stamped positive words all over some green "paper-cloth" I made last year. I free-motion stitched some leaves around the words and cut them out to be the top of a tree. I stitched a trunk out of miscellaneous yarns and threads wrapped in tulle, then stitched it all together onto the blue background. It's definitely more mixed-media, but I still don't know what my chances are for being published. There are lots of talented people who subscribe to Cloth Paper Scissors! Even so, it was a fun exercise and a nice positive start to the new year.