ATCs for the Crafter’s Companion Forum Swap

My friend Wendy has persuaded me to join my first ever swap! This is the February ATC (Artist Trading Card) swap, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve always thought I hadn’t really got time to do swaps, because when I’ve got the energy to do anything creative, it’s to complete projects I have to do for people’s birthdays etc. etc., but I thought, ATCs are small so don’t take too long, and it would be fun to have a go!

The theme for this month’s swap is “Love/Valentine” (of course!), so I decided to do something with hearts and a red colour scheme. When I was at the craft show I bought some scrim from the mixed media stand and have been keen to try it. It’s a natural, unbleached colour, so I cut some small rectangles (really difficult to handle, so I damped it a bit, which made it a lot easier) and then I swiped my Fired Brick Distress Ink pad across my craft mat, spritzed it with water and mussed the pieces around in it till they were a nice shade of red. Afterwards I dried them using my heat gun.

I’ve got some lovely hand-made paper with leaves in it, and I tore some little rectangles from this, and hand-wrote some words on them. The “Love” ones I stuck with photo-mount spray adhesive to the dyed scrim pieces.

I created the background paper with Serif Craft Artist Platinum, the new digital scrapbooking software that I recently obtained – and still have to learn how to use. What I wanted was a hand-made paper look, with a small repeating pattern on it, which in this case is made up of two different heart embellishments.

The top part of this background paper was torn, and overlaid onto a piece of black and pink Core-dinations card which I scored in close parallel lines on my Scor-Pal board, and then sanded, exposing the pink core on the raised parts. This Core-dinations card forms the basis for the ATC.

I cut two hearts for each ATC, one in bright red and the other in darker red, and stamped the bright red one with a darker red ink. The hearts were then hand-embossed from behind, and adhered to the ATC with Pinflair glue to prevent them being squashed. The text pieces were then added, using photo-mount spray adhesive.

I printed the clock face images onto card, and cut them out by hand, and then picked out the Roman numerals with Perfect Pearls, using a very fine watercolour brush.

Finally, I punched out some small hearts from gold paper and stuck these randomly onto the card. I had designed some ATC labels on the computer, using a hand-written script which I have converted into a font, and I glued these onto the backs of the ATCs, completing the details (title, date, etc.).

They have now been sent off, and I look forward to seeing what lovely ATCs come back to me at the end of the month!