Having an eye test and chiropractic and friends to dinner all in one day wasn’t my smartest move…and my shoulder and neck are definitely wanting a break from crochet for a while…so, l needed a project where l could work in bed with short bursts of stitching at the machine or by hand.
Collage cards are perfect:
a visual feast to uplift the spirits, a way of testing ideas out for twinchies [2inch canvases] and stash busting some recent gifts and impulse buys ;) Jennifer gave me some interesting used and saved wrapping papers and when l was prepping for playing with fire l sorted out some bought handmade papers for embellishment. They come in large multi-packs and there are always some l look askance at, being too patterned to work over easily. So I picked out the ‘flock wallpaper’ and heavily pressed ones, mixed and matched with wrapping papers and stitched to a backing paper. It would be just as easy to glue them, but by stitching them l start to ‘knock back’ the surface and personalize them, and l get very tentative if l don’t do that early on. A way round is to glue with coloured PVA, so that splashes can help break up the perfection and become starting points for embellishment.
Annoyingly I couldn’t find my pinking shears until I’d stitched everything down, cut shapes out of the collage sheets/complex papers l’d made and glued the first ten cards down, sigh! I was hunting for the broken pair – brown handles, not the neon yellow ones right in front of me, oops!
l prefer a deckled edge as it makes things merge better, but the shears won’t cut the flock surface anyway [that's how l broke the brown handled ones, grrr] so l will work distorting the edge with metallic marker dots etc. That’s a lot of work for a card, too much to get a minimum wage price on, except – aha!- part of the decoration is a detachable charm/totem, either a bracelet or hanging bedizener. Dome/roof shapes are for housewarming-blessings for moving, the ships are for journeys/exploration eg a course or placement as well as travelling. And cats, cos cats run the internet and are always popular!
Hopefully l will be able to potter along pacing myself with lots of rest between little bursts of activity. My downstairs neighbour is away so it has been a very quiet weekend, without him popping in for coffee and recipe swaps, but friends are coming for a bring and share meal on Tuesday, which gives me a chance to do some market research/ get some feedback on pricing – not knowing what to charge for things l never buy!
