More Very Vintage ATCs

Winter Wishes

Wonderful Wishes to everyone. Whatever "Winter Holiday" you celebrate may it be bright and happy.

I was invited to be an Artist On call this month for Red Lead. It's a wonderful shop in St Louis, MO that has the neatest vintage items for altered art. I found them through an internet friend ( Thanks so much Sally !) and am so glad I did. Their collage sheets are awesome and so is everything else they have. One drawback is that I don't live close enough to take advantage of their awesome looking Workshops. I wish I could be at every single one. We visited there this summer and Hubby still has no idea how much money I spent there. A link to their site is http://redlead.typepad.com/ . Please visit , you'll love it. I promise.

This is the card they posted. I forgot to photograph them before I sent them in so this is the only picture I have : (

I love Christmas Trees !

I am pretty sure that we all love Christmas trees. There is a little magic in each one of them. This time of year when I am through for the day with all of my projects and before I head to bed, I like to sit in the living room with only the tree lights on. We always have a fresh cut one and maybe there will be a day when I break down and have an artificial one, but as long as I am physically able there will be a tree in my house at Christmas. The box we keep our ornaments in has remnants of every tree we have had in our house. A piece of a branch or the slice of the trunk my husband cuts off of the bottom before we put it in the stand. Some of the little bits of branches still smell divine. Each ornament must be placed on the tree so that it dangles freely, ( my one and only rule.) Oh! the memories on that tree. I have ornaments from my grandmothers tree and my mothers tree, and many ornaments my children made over the years. When the ornaments are all on, there must be silver tinsel hung on every branch. (Well ok, another rule of mine.) Yeah, it looks kind of Retro but that is my image of a Christmas Tree that I hope I pass on to my kids. We will never have a designer tree. Just good old green tree with multi colored old fashioned lights and more ornaments than I can count. Hmmm.. that might be interesting to try and count them all. I just thought of another rule..everyone in the family must hang at least one ornament on the tree. Luckily everyone likes to help except my hubby. He will do his obligatory ONE ornament but that satisfies him.

So before I go to bed tonight, I'll fix my hot tea and sit in the dark looking at my beautiful tree and see just how many different things about Christmases of my past I am able to remember tonight. Magic!

"Honey" Birds

When my daughter was little that was her name for Hummingbirds. The tiny creatures are settling here for a while and will disappear in less than a month for warmer temperatures. We are totally enjoying their visit for now. They are not shy birds so we can stand in the window and watch their wings flutter 90 to nothing and they are not bothered in the least. There are about four hanging around now and are not as social as some of the other Hummies we have seen. They will not share the feeder and prefer dining alone. All they want is some clean nectar and they are happy as....well...Honey Birds.

More ATCs......

A couple more ATCs I have made recently. The first one's theme was music and I had a hard time with it. I finally came up with this idea. I think I like it better now than when I first finished it.

FrontBack

This was a single image swap. Everyone was given the same image. It was fun to see how differently we all treated this photo of the ladies eating ice cream.

One man's Junk.....

I must admit I am a hoarder. Not the kind you will find on TV. Yes, I am a pretty neat housekeeper, but I hoard all useful things that may end up altered or used in any number of projects that I may come up with. My husband has been trying to get rid of this $6.00 bulletin board that used to belong to one of my sons. It had drawings all over it and some of the cork was missing, but I just knew I could use it for something. Well, he threatened to throw it away one last time and told me that if I came up with an idea he would give me $6.00 to go buy a new one. I asked for 24 hours more and he agreed. He's really pretty good to me. We have been married 29 (GULP) years last weekend.

This is what I came up with.

Since I swap ATCs and usually fall in love with them and want to show them off, I am am not comfortable with sticking pins or tacks through them. I saw an ATC album for sale once that had these pages in it that you could just slip the card into the folds of the page. Then I thought , EUREKA !! , that's what I will do with this old cork board. First, I collaged (don't know if that's a word) the frame with bits of collage sheets that I had, glued down and sealed with Perfect Paper Adhesive. I LOVE this stuff and will never use Mod Podge again. PPA does not dry tacky and it dries pretty quickly. It comes in a matte and glossy finish. It's acrylic based and water resistant.

Next, I practiced with some newspaper the folds that I wanted to have on the board. When I got it how I wanted it , I went to the Art store and bought some heavy drawing paper in a "Manilla Folder" color ( I need three big sheets, after folding, the paper size really shrunk) . I folded it according to my practice paper and then sewed the sides with my sewing machine to keep the folds down. I used that sticky red tape and stuck it to the cork and Viola ! this is what I came up with. Now I can take out, look at and show off my favorite ATC's without harming them and it looks like it will hold a lot of them. Thanks for looking. If you have any questions, about specifics, please ask me in the comments.