Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Trash to Treasure Dancing Stars postcards - a tutorial

You know I had that little pile of dog ears from trimming my Dancing Stars quilt pieces. Well, I love making postcards with my quilting trash so that's what I did with these. 

I like making this style of card enough that I wanted to share a tutorial with you on how I do them.

I start with a base of stiff interfacing. I use Stiffy from LongCreek Mills  because it's so inexpensive but Timtex also works great. I cut the base about 20" x 18" and that will give me about 15 cards. I fuse a layer of Mistyfuse over the interfacing. I like Mistyfuse because it's so light and it doesn't gunk up my needed when I sew through it. 4

For my base fabric I am using the scraps from cutting my background fabric for the quilt. 

I pulled medium to dark value blue scraps with some star point reject fabrics and spread enough to fully cover the interfacing. Now, fuse it all in place. Next I added a layer of black Mistyfuse on top of the blue fabrics. Another benefit of Mistyfuse is that's it's quite sheer and you don't really see it on the fabric.

Mistyfuse is not paperbacked so fuse it with a teflon sheet on top.

Here's what it looks like after the black Mistyfuse is added. 

Now for the fun part! I sprinkled the dog ears all around but wanted to add some sparkle. I have a good stash of Glitter Hologram thread. I could just unwind a bunch of it and spread it around the surface but I think the effect is better if the thread is in smaller bits. I unwind lots of it on my cutting mat and chop it up with my rotary cutter and then sprinkle the bits all over the surface.

To hold it all together fuse on a layer of tulle. I chose a bright blue. At this point I could have quilted the entire piece with some metallic thread to hold it all together more secure but I wanted these to be fast cards. The fusible web will hold it all together long enough for me to finish the cards.

So it was time to cut them up into 4" x 6" postcard sized pieces and to decide what else to do with them.

Since the quilt is called Dancing Stars and the cards look like a night sky, I just had to add a big star. I found some hand dyed scraps and free-form cut some stars. I made some in gold and some in purple.

I didn't even fuse these. I just placed them on the card and zig-zag stitched around the star with metallic thread. I tried a straight stitch but it did not look nice and the metallic thread made a huge difference too.

Now they are almost done! For the backs I add fusible web to a large piece of light value fabric and cut it into 4" x 6" pieces. Fuse a back on each card.

I finished the edges with my serger using Razzle Dazzle thread in the upper looper but a serger is not required. You can zig zag the edges or even straight stitch the edges to finish off a postcard.

If you've never tried making postcards I hope you will give them a try sometime. They are a fun way to experiment with techniques and products and people love getting them in the mail. Some people buy clear envelopes to mail them but I send mine through the mail nekked with a first class stamp and they usually arrive just fine. Occasionally I also leave one for my mail lady so that she's really happy to take them and mail them for me!

 

 

Starry Night postcards

This is the 3rd and last postcard design I did for my Christmas cards this year. The background is hand dyed fabric. The stars are cut with my Go! Cutter from some painted fabric in my stash. It's hard to see in the photo but the stars have a lot of glimmer and shine. I painted some white fabric with pearlized and metallic paints. I fused Mistyfuse to the back of the white fabric before cutting out the stars. That made these cards quick and easy! 

To hold the stars down for their trip in the mail I stitched some clouds in the sky with Glimmer thread. The edges are finished with Superior Razzle Dazzle and then added some sparkly crystals. 

I made 24 of these and I think they are very happy!

Related articles

Button Tree Christmas Postcards (with tutorial)

Monoprint tree postcards

My Christmas card production became a 2-day mission this year so I don't have any in process photos for you. But these were simple to make. 

To make the monoprints I cut out some triangle shapes from paper for the trees. Then I painted white and blue paint on glass and added some texture in the paint. I positioned 3 paper trees on the paint and then printed my fabric. The paper, as a resist, kept the paint off the fabric to give me the tree silhouette.

For the stitching I used King Tut white for the snow and used Superior Metallic for the trees. I drew in the stitching with an air erasable pen and then free motion stitched over the marks. I finished off the edges with a serged edge using 3 different decorative threads in the looper to get the color I wanted. The last touch is one crystal on the center tree. 

I made about 17 of these cards. I think I will do some more monoprinting for cards for next year because I really like these a lot.

Button Tree Christmas Postcards (with tutorial)

This is the 6th year that I have made Christmas postcards to send to my friends and family. I am told that they are very popular so I keep making them. I make between 60 and 80 each year and usually in 3 different designs. My favorite is still the Silver Christmas Tree (also with a tutorial) that I made with leftover dress silk from my friend, Kim.

I am kind of hooked on the tree theme. I always do at least 1 tree design. This year there will be 2.

I like this button tree a lot so wanted to share with you how to make it.

The design is sun printed on the fabric and you can easily sun print with a lamp. You can get complete sun printing instructions here. Since these will not be washed, you can use any thin acrylic paint and you do not have to heat set the fabric after it's dry. Cut a piece of fabric a bit larger than 4" x 6", grab some paint and buttons and go to it. Following the instructions in the sun printing tutorial, paint the fabric, arrange the buttons and dry it with a lamp set up.

Play around with background colors, mixing paint colors (this would look great on a bright multi-colored background) and button arrangements. You will get the best print using darker paint colors. Yellow, for example, and pale colors do not show the contrast as well.

After the fabric is dry and you have removed the buttons, trim the fabric to 4" x 6" (with the tree centered) and fuse the fabric to a 4" x 6" piece of stiff interfacing like Timtex, Peltex, Fast2Fuse or Stiffy. 

Add some garland to the tree by stitching around all of the buttons with a metallic thread. I used Glitter from Superior Threads. It's a very sparkly thread and with a size 14 topstitch needle I didn't have even 1 thread break in all 21 cards. I traveled a path around every button so that I would not have to backtrack or tie off. The tree is done in one continuous "seam". This is a good time to use up some partial bobbins. As long as the bobbin thread is light in color and will not show through the fabric you place on the back, you can use anything.

Now it's time to decorate the tree. I am showing you two different things I tried here. I did the card on the left first by basically stitching in each "buttonhole". I used a red and gold metallic thread. While I think it looks OK, I felt that it sort of hid the buttons. I made the rest of the cards like the one on the right. I like it much better. I found a satin-stitched circle motif in my machine's programmed stitches and set it to do a single motif. I placed an "ornament" in the spaces between the buttons using a red metallic thread. 

Other options for decorating the tree would be to fuse crystals, hand stitch french knots or machine or hand stitched cross-stitches.

The front of the card is done! Fuse a backing fabric on the card and finish the edge. For the backing I usually apply Mistyfuse to a large piece of light colored fabric and then cut it into 4" x 6" pieces. For the edging I used some shiny red thread in my serger but you can do a sating stitch around the edge. If you don't want to do that you could even just stitch a few times around the edge with a straight stitch.

For some added sparkle I stitched an inner border of silver around the card. I used a zig zag stitch set at a length of .05 and width of 2.5. The stitching overlaps the very inner edge of my serged edge.

I put my cards int he mail "naked" which is why I do not over-embellish them. I like that the arrive with the postmark right on the card and it doesn't bother me that they occasionally arrive with a little dirt. I think that makes them more authentic. But I do take one additional step to make my cards as sturdy as possible. I put a drop of Fray Check on each corner front and back before I trim up any loose threads. You can see that the corners look dark here but Fray Check dries clear and you can tell in the photo of the finished card that it doesn't show. It really helps to keep any threads from coming undone in the mail.

Here are my first batch of 21 cards ready for addressing and mailing.

I think you could do a lot of cool ideas with sun printing buttons. A wreath or star motif would work really well too. Now on to my next batch of cards.

 

Crazy patch leaf postcards

I always give a postcard to our Airbnb guests so I go through postcards pretty quickly. I needed some new ones and here's what I came up with.

My favorite materials for postcards are bits and leftovers. In a recent TED day with Estelle I had some leftover gold ink. So I pulled out these scraps of green hand dyed fabric and stamped some small leaves. These stamps are all from Fred B. Mullett.

Next I found this small pile of leftover hand dyed strips.

A few minutes at the machine and I had a crazy patch postcard built around the leaf print. At this point I was going to do some decorative stitching on the seams but I wasn't really in the mood for that. I did think it needed more gold though.

I stitched a gold leaf silhouette around the stamp. This is over stitched about 5 times so that the gold would stand out nicely. Then I used a gray/gold variegated thread to echo around the leaf shape. The edge is serged using 2 strands of different variegated greens. I still felt like it needed more gold so I did my little inside frame treatment.

The final result is not a masterpiece but it's not bad and now I have 10 more cards for guests.