Sunday, April 19, 2015

Appreciating Little Pieces of Works

Swaps are moving slow and recently taking a long time to arrive - 1 returned to sender (me) after 5 weeks and another took more than 2 months to come!  Still waiting for another 2, hope they will eventually arrive.

First the Chinese New Year ATC swap organised by MaryAnn. I can't thank the artists properly as I couldn't quite made out the hand-written names... MaryAnn, Janis Graham and ?
Then there was the Bowl of Hearts swap by the Surface Design group. The hearts as done by (top left going clockwise) Aynsley McKay, Carole Hanson, Cathy Vigor and Jan Lewis. Aynsley's heart was needle-felted by hand; Carole's heart coloured by transperse dyes; Cathy's heart was nuno felting and Jan's heart was coloured with numerous methods including Pebro Setacolors and acid reduction dyes.

Here's the jointed ATC doll from (left) Eileen Kiban (USA) and (right) Linda Edkins Wyatt (USA).  Linda's doll took 2 plus months to reach me, but definitely worth the wait. Isn't it amazing how big the doll can get and it still rotate back to the size of a ATC!

Still waiting for the replacement ATC doll from Linda after we thought the original one went astray. 

I did some spring tags and binded 4 in accordion fold to form a tag book. A set each went to Mel Dunkley (UK) and Nikki Smith (USA), who is also the host of this swap. I made good use of the CNY red packets! And I added butterflies cut from aluminum drink cans. They were sharp and kept curling up and I did get some small cuts on my hands.
Received this from Beckie. So different from my style, soothing earth tones with a good mix of sharper colours and a tight flow in and between the tags. 
Pam C's tag book is still somewhere out there, hope it  turn up soon. 

A little while ago, Holly asked about my tatted alphabets/words. Actually I started many years ago with wires. And I recently did a name in wire, so here it is, a gift for my ex-colleague.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

April ATC Session @Bishan Library

This month, the library arranged an external instructor to come in to our ATC session to do some stenciling printing. We used styrofoam with poster colours to print.  Quite fun actually, and fast to do compared to lino printing.  The results are as colourful as you can get, though they look a bit unfinished (bottom right-hand corner of photo).  Let's see what I can add on to finish the ATCs for a butterfly swap. 

And there's also the black-coated rainbow papers with which some of the participants used to create some very pretty ATCS. 
My first-ever Easter ATCs!  I have wanted to do more in egg-shaped, but can't find the time to do.
Cards from Cheo Hiang and Keerthi.

More about the baggie swap later. 

The theme for May session is "All About Singapore".  Hope we'll get enough cards for an exhibition in the later part of the year.