A New Passion--Fabric/Quilted Postcards!

My friend Linda has inspired and motivated me...again!  Linda has been an accomplished artist for years.  Her paintings employ a variety of media and are symbolic, allusional, and totally unique.  Every time you see one of her paintings, you see something new and breath-taking.  I started quilting years before she did, but since the quilting bug bit this artist friend, she has now inspired me to try both journal quilts and now, fabric/quilted postcards!

The ones here are for my little great nieces, Katie and Alice.  Readers of this blog may recall that I made both girls little "quilties"--miniature versions of the quilts I made when they were very little--to take with them on trips.  Both girls are now at a camp in Wisconsin.  I had promised them I'd write, so I thought it would be fun would be to send each niece one of my fabric cards.  I found the cute girly fabric at Hobby Lobby.  I used friend Lin's method of adhering the binding strips to the four sides of the cards with adhesive, using Steam a Seam.   To personalize Katie's and Alice's cards, I bound each with fabric that was used in both their original quilts and their little quilties.  I found another super fabric at Hobby Lobby that was printed with the 50 states. So I used the Steam a Seam to adhere cut-outs of both Texas (where the girls live) and Wisconsin (where the camp is located).

For the backs of the postcards, I used fabrics to coordinate with the bindings--yellow for Katie and pink for Alice. Before binding, I fused both front and back to a product I've never used before, a very stiff double-sided fusible interfacing called InnerFuse.  I've added some swatches of the fabrics used for the fronts here to better show their character.

For the very first postcard I made I used another technique:  using fusible fleece for the batting. This postcard is lightly quilted, whereas the other two above are not.   The fleece was fused to front and back and then the two fused layers were sandwiched and then bound with narrow strips of fabric.  This is an early birthday card for Linda, who's been mentioned often in this post today!