Fish out of water

Because of course I need more challenges in my life (not) I couldn't resist this new one - Fluffy Fatbottom's Twisted Tuesdays. I mean, how could I resist something called Fluffy Flatbottom? The idea is a postcard sized piece of work with "off the wall, different and sometimes twisted challenges" each week. Sounds good to me. You can work in any media, so being me, mine is fabric based, though I thought with these, I'd do a little more collage, etc. with paper and mixed media. I have lots of bits of paper and images I have been collecting, so a chance to use some of them would be nice.





This week, the theme was "a fish out of water" and the brief was to have a fish doing "something totally different than swimming comfortably in water". As I was rummaging for some imges of fish I just got from Artchix, I came across some gold German scrap wings (also from Artchix) and suddenly, knew what my fish would be doing. Today, the idea of the nest with baby fish waiting to be fed came to me, so I added that. Ta da! This was fun and very quick to assemble - I think with these it will often be the case of an idea percolating for a day or two in your brain before the idea is put down on a card. Anyway - do join in, if you are into this kind of stuff - it promises to be great fun.



Still felt like doing small things today (am procrastinating quilting that baby quilt - bad me) so I did some inchies for a swap I found while bloghopping last night. This is a monthly inchie swap, with a given theme - you make 9 (0r more), send in 8, and get 8 random ones in return. The theme this month was black & orange, so I've done a dozen black and orange inchies (the number being determined entirely by my pulling out a spare scrap of vilene and finding it was 6x2). One of them has something Hallowe'eny on it (the bat) but for the rest, I have resisted, despite having an entire set of Hallowe'en themed confetti - pumpkins, bats, black cats, and two other things, I forget what.

Also finished up the Autumn Colours postcards, though they won't go in the post until Wednesday, as there is a postal strike until then. Grr. With these, I didn't do the standard satin stitch edging, but decided to do a straight stitch around the outside of the cards, and then dip the edges of the cards into paint to finish. A fun technique, makes a nice change.


And here are the last of my postal treasures until at LEAST Wednesday, possibly longer (they "can't promise" service will resume normally after the strike. Did I say Grr already?). Anyway, these two are: left - a poppy from Anne R for the 1910s swap ("In Flanders fields the poppies blow" - the poppy is the symbol of lives lost during WWI). And on the right, a recycle card from Flischa, who has used bits left over or discarded from other projects to produce this lovely blue and gold piece. I think I'm going to go through postcard withdrawal!

I also had two quilts back from my friend Lana, the longarmer - one was a practice quilt for her to play about with her new Intelliquilter on, one was something she's had for ages, which finally came out to be quilted - I'll show them tomorrow, as I will be at school all day working in the library, etc and then there's a disco and then we are going out in the evening, so there will be absolutely no chance of sewing and I'll need something to show (and of course, there won't be any post tomorrow because of the strike - did I mention there's a big postal strike? Grr!)