Artist Trading Cards

ATCs are little artistic gems, the size of baseball trading cards. It is always amazing to me to see what can be done with 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" of surface.

The Freestylers are having a Valentine's Day ATC exchange at our February meeting, and I've been working on my card.  And there are others to be given ATCs as well, so the ideas have been popping up right and left as I ply my needle at my embroidery table.

I assembled five of the hearts for an exhibit in Knoxville this weekend for the Heart Association:

Peggy was kind enough to pick them up as she and Bob passed through Atlanta on their way home from Florida.

These are some older ATCs I've made and kept simply because I like them.  The first was cut up from a large piece of black fabric I found in the 1980s and used as a place to play with needle and thread:

Fabric suitable for free-style embroidery (i.e., non-evenweave fabric) was much more difficult to come by then than now.  The next two are a pair, a sort of winter-summer look at a stem and its foliage.  Leaves springing from a curling stem will always make my heart light.  They seem so ready for something, anything at all, to come their way.

  

I will continue to dig and find the others I've set aside for myself.  The idea that this tiny format can hold beautiful ideas is fascinating, isn't it?  But then, I suppose the collectors of baseball cards feel a bit like that, too, don't they?