I needed to send a couple of cards to my friend in Australia. I recently decided to make all my own cards wherever possible (it fits in so well with designing digital stamps!) so these two were designed with my friend in mind (hello, Ros!). She sews, so I wanted a sewing theme... (that bit wasn't difficult!)
I designed the stamps myself (these are from prints of the original stamps) - they'll be available on my new digital stamps website when it's up and running properly (3rd June, if you are interested). Edited to add:look at this link for the sewing machine thank you digi stamp and this one for the happy birthday quilt digi stamp.
I printed the images onto 160gsm card - it's a thin enough weight for my printer to handle it easily, but heavy enough to be substantial enough for sewing.
I always enjoy getting the ProMarkers* out, don't you?(*insert colouring device of choice here!) There's something incredibly relaxing about adding colour to an image.
And then I hunted around for some fabric. I decided to sew together the coloured stamps, the fabric and some heavyweight interfacing as a backing.
I used black thread and what seems to be turning into my trademark sketchy stitching. The stitching echoes the sketchy lines in my drawings rather well I think...but I wouldn't recommend sewing over the same line more than once when card or paper is involved - I kept the stitching on the paper to one line with quite a long stitch length.
And a close up peek... you can see the stitching on the edge has repeated sketchy lines, but the stitching on the inside (which goes through the paper too) is just one line of stitching.
It worked beautifully, and a few buttons finished off each card
I then added some sticky pads at the back of the stitched piece, to stick to a card blank.
There's something quite lovely about a lot of texture (fabric, ribbon, stitching and buttons) on a card - oh, and handmade, of course...
You can't really beat handmade, can you?
