Creating on a Colorful Scale

I find that most of my "creative" time is spent doing something related to business. While dyeing is creative, rewarding and completely enjoyable, more time is spent in marketing, accounting, and other non-fulfilling activities. Let me immediately irritate all those who find accounting fascinating by noting that those individuals whom engineers like myself more or less affectionately refer to as "bean counters" are the ones who coined the oxymoronic phrase "creative accounting".

So it was with great pleasure that I finished updating my business books and found myself with an entire Friday to spend in my studio. I've been designing a floral bouquet to show off the product of my Color Wheel Dyeing class. When I hit a snag in the design, I decided to take a break and make some postcards from the colorful scraps. These small scale creations allow me to a)thriftily use my scraps, b)actually finish a project and c)allow my sub-conscious mind to worry on the larger project's snag while keeping my conscious mind occupied.

I made four postcards. The first two will go to members of The Omaha Postcard Exchange.

Seaweed #1




Fractured Color Wheel #1





Fractured Color Wheel #2

This postcard will go to my sister as a belated birthday card. Happy Birthday, Natalie!





Fractured Color Wheel #3

My husband claimed this one for himself.

Why Use One Fabric When You Have Twenty?

When I make quilts, I like to work with many fabrics, rather than a few. Making these "scrap" quilts always generates SCRAPS! I saved the long skinny ones for string piecing. Most of the chunky scraps I threw away. But my hand-dyed fabric scraps were too precious to discard. When the scrap collection outgrew the first three storage boxes, each larger than the one before, I decided I had to start using them. I call the technique I've been exploring for about a year "Too Small To Keep - Too Big To Throw Away" (TSTK-TBTTA). These scraps fall into the 2-4" range. Bigger scraps are big enough to do something with, smaller scraps are a PITA to work with.

And yet, I found myself fusing these teeny scraps to a 4" x 6" Peltex postcard base. Scraps with fusible web on them, trimmed off a TSTK-TBTTA scrap. Scraps that are smaller than PITA-size scraps. Scraps so small that I normally don't even hesitate before tossing them into the trash. Scraps so small that they don't deserve to be called scraps! And I was using them.

My placement technique was simple - the scrap should cover Peltex, not other scraps. When I had the entire base covered with a jarring collection of color and shape, I "quilted" by sewing many straight lines at odd angles across the scraps.

Leftover from June's Journal Quilt were quite a few sort-of/almost triangular pieces of pink fabrics. These became the petals of my FireWorks Flower. I like how the flower quiets the explosion of color of the background. I'm not crazy about the dark gray chunks near the edges of the postcard, but I decided to think of them as the paper housing which gets blown away unnoticed when fireworks are set off.

This postcard will be mailed to the next person (Betty H) on my Omaha Postcard Exchange List.


The 2nd postcard is Blue Daisy. I finished the postcard, signed it, wrote the date as 2005 not once, but THREE times. Twice on the front, once on the back. If not for a daughter who pointed it out, I might never have caught my error. After four days of agonizing over my error, I mailed it to my June Postcard recipient without correction. My first ever late mailing :(