1, 2, 3 Quilted Postcards

As promised, here is a post about some quilted postcards I made recently.

Last August, shortly after seeing a video about quilted postcards, I contacted my quilting cousins/sister to see if they wanted to do an exchange at our retreat in February. They liked the idea, so it was set.

Then I forgot about it! At Christmas my sister asked me a question about the project and had to remind of it. (What a terrible exchange host I am!)

Less than a week after getting home from that Christmas visit, I started my first card.

I took a piece of white cotton and laid some strips on it, covering the entire surface--one overlapping the next, raw edges showing. Once I had it covered how I wanted, I sewed along any raw edge that was showing. I just used black thread for all of it, but you could make it more complicated and match thread if you wanted.

Then I had the idea to lay some tulle over it. (I just happen to have a roll of it.)

I cut the tulle a little larger than needed, spread it out over the surface, and sewed it down around the edges.

But, before I sewed down the last side,

I threw in some tiny fabric pieces I had cut up. I wanted them trapped under the tulle but loose and free to move around.

Next I added a few more strips on top of the tulle. First I put on some very thin strips, so thin they just needed one line of stitching and I could bend and curve them as I went. You can see a little bit of the centre blue one and the black on the right, and a tiny bit of the yellow on the bottom.

That step turned out not to have a big impact, because most of it was covered up when I decided to put some big "trees" in the foreground. To do that I added the strips of brown and sewed a wood grain pattern on it.

I finished it by attaching strips of black for the border (also raw edge) and appliquing a couple fussy cut flowers. The edges were finished with two rounds of zig zag stitch.

The last step was to add the paper card to the back. I used a 4x6 index card and sewed it on the machine from the front along the inside edge of the zig zag edging.

(The little gap you see is where I didn't sew over the pink flower.)

So that was a fun little project I finished in a day. I pinned it up on my board with plenty of time to finish the other two.

At the end of the month, my sister came to visit and, of course, I showed her the card. (I'm a big believer in show and tell on both sides of the interaction!)

She loved it. Maybe she was being polite the first time, but about the third time she picked it up again and said how much she loved it, I was taking note.

It so happens her birthday was the following week, so after she left, I mailed it to her as a birthday card! We had debated how well a quilted postcard would make it through the mail, and I put it to the test. It did just fine. She was very pleased:

Now it would seem I was down one postcard, but one cousin dropped out of the exchange. Not the best outcome, but convenient for me nonetheless! So there were still two to go.

One of the piles of fabric and stuff lying on my sewing machine table was various extra honeycombs I had cut for my Lucy Boston quilt, but not used. Most of them were from the gradient block I did. I went through all my fabric at the time and instead of pulling some out and having to put it all away again, I just cut a honeycomb from any fabric that might work. This gave me lots to choose from.

[too long; didn't read: I had lots of extra honeycombs.]

I decided to put them together in a random but pleasing sort of way to cover the surface of the card. I hand stitched them together and then decided to hand quilt as well.

I used the same color floss for all of them. Unlike the last postcard, I actually did use some batting in this one. I used a solid white for the backing.

Once it was stitched and quilted, I trimmed the edges straight. This little quilt did not want a zig zag edge, but called for a hand-stitched blanket stitch.

So that is what I did.

And now the final card. Like a third child, this poor postcard has no in-progress pictures! So here is the final result:

I did the letters with the improve method in Tonya Ricucci's book Word Play Quilts. I chose to make all of the letters from red fabric, but the word is subtle enough you have to look for it. I added the strip of people across the top because, well first because they're cute, but also to make the proportions work better.

I put batting in this one too and did straight line quilting mostly along the vertical lines of the letters and then some in between to even out the spacing. I didn't quilt over any part of the letters.

Neither of these fit the index cards I had, so I cut a back for each of them from a piece of white card stock. I sewed the paper onto the Hello card with no problem--once again using a straight stitch on the inside edge of the zig zag edging.

I did the same thing with the honeycomb card and it didn't not come out at all. That was the end of the day and I left it. By that time it was getting close to retreat time and didn't have a chance to do more than pull out the bad stitches.

With some embarrassment but hoping for some understanding, I gave the card to my cousin with promises to finish it before the weekend was done.

I was a little flummoxed as to what to do. I didn't trust just running it through the sewing machine again. The paper was perforated around the edge from the first stitching and sewing over it again may just separate the paper along the stitching line. I also didn't like how the perforations looked but I didn't want to use a new piece because I had done a little lettering design on it.

I finally hit on the idea of trimming the paper a little smaller, which would cut off most of the perforated part, and then sewing it by hand. I made holes with a needle along the edge of a ruler every quarter inch and then used the holes for some more blanket stitch.

Here is a peak at the lettering:

I did it on the other card as well, but no picture, because, you know, third child.

Here are all the cards we made and exchanged:

The ones gifted to me are the ones on the bottom of each "column". Lucky me!!