Artist Trading Card swap complete

Here are the Artist Trading Cards my classmates made. Enjoy.

My First Artists Trading Cards

Recently I made my very first set of Artists Trading Cards when one of my class mates made the suggestion that we would have fun doing this as a group project. There are 9 women participating in the challenge, so I made 9 cards.
I chose to relate the cards to my first book, The Maria Challenge Quilt. I gathered all the scraps left over from the quilt I made, the one which appears on the cover.

 

Then I sewed the scraps together into a rectangle, as best I could. 

 Once all the pieces had been incorporated, I slashed and sewed, slashed and sewed in different directions until the fabric piece was made of smaller pieces of each pattern.

 Next I cut up 9 cards, 6" x 4" as instructed to do.

 I hand stitched the letter 'M' onto each card, using chain stitch (because the theme of the book was the convict women transported to Australia in the early 19th century). 'M' is for both Margaret and Maria.

 The cards were quilted onto a stiff polyester wadding with a hand dyed yellow/orange fabric for the backing. This backing fabric was hand dyed by my good friend Lisa, who edits my books - another connection to The Maria Challenge Quilt. The quilting was simple straight lines to represent the bars of a gaol.

 Each card was finished off with a machine zigzag stitch around the edge.

 I wrote my name on the back along with my email address. The finishing touch was to sew a key charm on each card. This is symbolic in two ways - there is a key on the cover of The Maria Challenge Quilt, representing both incarceration and freedom, and secondly, my official surname is Rowe-Keys, so the key is the extra bit of my name. Above is a single key, but I like the bunch of keys on the card below. They look more like a gaoler's set of keys.

We make our swap tomorrow. Am looking forward to seeing what processes my class mates have used.

Mothers Day

My daughter gave me wonderful Mothers Day gifts which included Jinny Beyer's book, a chocolate tulip, earrings and a card full of the most beautiful (and superlative) words. I was also able to spend the day tucked up indoors out of the rain and wind and cold, and do what I felt like, which included homework for my classes - I made a couple of colour wheels, one using acrylic paints, and began a stitch sample. We also watched Little Women, the version with Elizabeth Taylor in it. I can't believe how much it is like Anne of Green Gables in storyline, and how many lines from the Anne miniseries are identical to those from Little Women. I cried - of course.

UK Friend

Eagle at entrance to Healesville Sanctuary

We've had a friend visiting from Leeds in the UK. I haven't seen her for 26 years and it was SO good to spend four days with her. My itinerary was full and exhausting and we didn't quite make it to the end of my list of things to do, but that was okay. We had a great many laughs along the way, usually at my expense! We tried to give her as comprehensive an overview of our part of Australia as we could, going to Healesville Sanctuary to see the Aussie animals, the Patchwork Tea House (my happy place), Sovereign Hill, Clunes Booktown, Melbourne arcades, market, Shrine of Remembrance, Botanic Gardens ...
We all ended up foot sore and weary, but happy. She's gone to Sydney now, and I miss her.