April theme ATCs

Dancer Pan

Finally finished off my ATCs (Artists Trading Cards) for this month's swap taking place tomorrow, I'm not usually so late. I go to a lovely group at the Seattle Quilt Company in Aberdeen once a month run for free by the very generous Fiona. Last month she showed us how to use foils so I duly bought some and have managed to use them in this set, they're actually very easy once you get used to them.

This month's theme was 'April' because I liked 'April Fool' and someone else liked 'April Showers' so 'April' was a compromise. ATCs are the size of playing cards and in fact playing cards were originally used for the backings, and I collect playing cards so using the jokers to illustrate 'April Fool' suited me perfectly. I don't have as many packs as I used to so, breaking my trend to date, there are only 2 designs in this set, one with and one without variations. These are my favourites, there were other jokers but most were a bit sinister. Dancer is from a beautiful reproduction pack of turn of the century art nouveau cards, and Pan from a Greek Mythology set I acquired on honeymoon in Rhodes.

I wanted to pad this set so scanned the two playing cards I liked into my computer, printed them off onto Crafty Computer Paper's wonderful sew on printable cotton, cut them out and layered spare fleece between the pictures and a backing of Pelmet Vilene. I couldn't quilt normally because of the stiffness of the Vilene so I stab stitched quilting round the designs and then stitched round the outside. If I'd had more time I would have liked to have hand stitched the edges, machine running stitch worked mostly fine but there were some pretty close calls on the edges.
Then I foiled the designs, I foiled all the staffs on the Pan cards and different elements of the Dancer cards, once I got the hang of the foil and leaving it to dry slightly I thought it worked really well.