Postcard city & prizes!!

Lots of photos today, mostly postcardy things. I finished off the summer cards - I borrowed Judi's technique of using invisible thread and a blind hem stitch to attach fluffy yarn around the edges of the cards, and it worked very well (and already, I've used something I bought yesterday - invisible thread!).

Then I got started on Anna's washer challenge. I decided to do a series of six cards called Washers: Traits in Common. Each of the cards has three items (or item groups) in the boxes. And on each card, the items all have something in common. No two cards have the same single thing in common, though it's possible it may appear so at first glance or that two elements may share something on a different card, if you see what I mean. Here's where the prizes come in: As these cards aren't for a swap or anything, I am going to use them as prizes for the 5 people who correctly guess the largest number of themes (I will keep one for myself, too, as I like to do that when I make a series). And just in case this sounds really cryptic, we're not looking for the DaVinci Code here - the kind of stuff they have in common is "things which are green" or "things which are square". ..

You have until the end of June to send in your guesses, and just so that people don't get an unfair advantage by seeing what's already in the comments (we'll not call it cheating, because I'm sure none of you would cheat, would you!) why don't you email me your guesses to katelnorth at yahoo dot com instead of commenting. I will update the blog regularly with who has guessed, and how many guesses each person has right. I tested my DH and kids (well, the girls - not the 4 year old) on these earlier today and they got most of them, though I will warn you, one of them is pretty tough. In the event of a tie, I'll draw names randomly. Oh, and you may notice the edges don't look finished yet - this is because the edges aren't finished yet :). But they will be, before I send them out as prizes.

Just so you can see better, here are some more detailed photos:

I'll give you a clue - the "hard" one is the bottom card in the middle photo. The rest are fairly straightforward. The bottom right is a little tricky perhaps, too. For those of you who haven't seen the washers in person, they are about the size of a 5p (or a dime, if you are American - for elswhere in the world, you will just have to guess!), though much thinner and are made of silver coloured metal with a rectangular hole in the centre. I think that's all fairly obvious from the photos, but just so there can be no doubts. With that information, you should be able to work out all the themes. If you have any questions about the other objects I have used, just ask - some of them may not be obvious from the photos.

Anyway, I ALSO started work on some postcards for an Angelina theme. I decided that this time, I would do something different from what I normally do with Angelina, which is to fuse it into sheets and cut shapes, or else use wispy bits of it over other images. So what I did was to take all the leftover pieces from the sheets I normally make and scrunch them up into balls and re-iron them, which changes the colour and takes away some of the shine. Then I used my new darning foot (see? all those purchases were obviously justified - although perhaps I shouldn't admit that both those things have been on my list of stuff I need to buy for a while, rather than being impulse purchases) to do some free motion quilting to hold the angelina down. Then I took them downstairs and painted them with Jacquard Lumiere paints. Some of it, I just dabbed on, but some of it, I put a squiggle on a piece of paper, then put the card facedown on the squiggle and blotted. This was fun, and frankly, the resulting paper looks great and will definitely get used for something down the line...

The paper is on the left - on the right is a piece of fabric I have painted squiggles on as the basis for a couple of postcards for a fabric painting challenge with one of my postcard groups. I may add more once it's dry and I can have another look at it. Or I may (finally) get out the paintsticks that I bought a while ago (we won't say when - not sure I even remember) and give them a try.

And finally (I think) - here's some post I received. I got both of these cards today, as well as my own London card back safe and sound, charm and all.

The butterfly on the left is from Ella as part of the Open Theme with Beads swap on FAI, and the fish are for the Angelina swap (as usual, the Angelina doesn't photograph particularly well) and are from Cheryl. And I think that's it for today. Maybe :)