Holiday Memories ATC's

Here are three of the five ATC's I have made for the Artella Holiday Memories ATC Swap. I want to get the other two made today and all of them mailed out tomorrow. The deadline for mailing isn't until Dec. 3 but I have so many other things in the works that I'd like to get these marked off my list so I can concentrate on my big projects.

I'm pretty happy with these so far. You can click on each photo to get a better view. I found this glittered white scrapbook paper that just looked like snow with either the sun or the stars shining down on it. I knew it would be a perfect backdrop for these memory cards. I now have to decide on how I want to do the remaining two. I'll post those when they are finished.

Other things in the works: I've signed up for an art techniques swap. This is a big project. I recently joined the Art Techniques Yahoo group. This is a group whose main focus is on art techniques; not so much the art itself, but the backgrounds and effects you get when you make your art. This sounded real interesting. I started looking at their photos and they have some very talented artists; some whose names I recognize from the Somerset Studio magazine and other Stampington publications. So I knew I was in the right place.

I was sad to see that they had just completed a fat book swap. What is a fat book? It's a sampler book of, in this case, 120 different art techniques. The swap entailed each artists making as many 4" x 4" pages as there were people signed up for the swap. That swap had 120 people signed up, so each artist made 120 separate pages; one for each participant. They used the same technique that they had signed up for on each of their pages, but they had to make 120 separate pages. No photocopies allowed. Basically you just make a big bunch of huge sheets of your technique and cut it down to 120 individual 4 x 4 sheets. Anyway, that swap had just ended and people were starting to receive their box of pages in the mail.

One person was responsible for hosting this swap. What a job! She had to make sure that each person who sent her a box of 120 pages of their technique had actually sent 120 pages. (You were supposed to include a couple of extra pages, just in case your count was off.) Then she had to swap them all out. She had 120 people mail her their boxes of pages. Then she had to turn around, swap all of them out and mail 120 packages back to the participants. You include the postage for her when you sign up, so she's not out any money. It's mind-boggling, but it seemed to work out pretty well. Everyone was raving about their packages! They received 120 loose pages that they would then bind however they wanted to. It would be impractical for the poor hostess to have to also BIND the pages. Plus, people have their own way of how they want to bind their pages, or even IF they want them bound.

So I was feeling let down that they had just finished this huge project, when one day one of the messages said, "Why not do another one?" I perked right up and before I knew it they had a database set up for people to register for the 2009 fat book swap! Yay!! I signed up the first day and picked as my technique, "fabric paper". It's a technique I read about by the artist Beryl Taylor. I saw it in the premier issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine about 4 years ago. They have since revisited the technique, but I keep all of those mags and I have her step by step instructions on how to do it. Sooo... that is what I really want to start working on. I love my ATC's, but I'm ready to start tackling this project!

I'll explain more about the technique and how I'm doing different variations as I get into it. Stay tuned...