Gifts with meaning and practice in making

It is August and I have a ton of buddies with birthdays coming up, it has me in the studio making cards and little special bits to send off through the post office.

I won't give away too much info as this needs to get shipped off yet, but I was recently gifted a large pile of textile treasures and I used some of these as inspiration and as material for cards.

Just a few of the new textile specimen.  I was inspired by the embroidered and printed patterns of these "new" items.

So taking the colors and patterns to the drawing board, I then set to work with my watercolors.  I haven't pulled those out in a bit, so I was a little rusty and mostly playing with color.  

It should be mentioned that I also stole/ borrowed some of AB's paper in order to work on.  He had, I thought, given me a sketchbook from when he used to take art lessons in middle school.  When I told him I used the paper, he acted a little more like I had stolen it. ;)

After getting these little flowers out on paper, I decided to cut them out and play around with making them the decoration on my birthday card envelopes.  

I used Elmer's glue in order to attach the cutouts onto the envelopes.  From there, I pulled some of the more worn textiles, and cut them down in order to fit onto a paper card.  I glued the fabric to the paper and then added some hand stitched embellishments.  I pulled from my collection of colorful bits that are kept in the studio.  

I was also able to write my special birthday message on the back, paper side.  And now I am off to the post office in order to get this little card along with a small gift to its proper recipient.  I am likely going to be belated a day, but hey handmade comes when it comes.  Happy Making!