28 people fulfilled their goal of making ten individual cards. Here they all are, 280 cards laid out on my freshly-swept living room floor:
The themes this year were either "surprise" or "text." Everyone had such a unique take on these ideas. Brittany, from Fort Collins, found words that were inspiring on the pages of a book. Using a tag template, she cut those places out and highlighted the words in colored pencil.
Claudia (Fort Collins) found her inspiration in the stars. She matched up constellations to their noun in the dictionary, then used a pin to poke the constellation into the face of the card itself. Hold it up to light and you can see the constellation!
When I first met Gale (Fort Collins) a few years ago, I saved her contact info in my phone as as "Gale the sunflower painter." She certainly does other things, but for her first year in the swap, painted these beauts on the back of vellum then added details and highlights in copic marker and colored pencil on the opposite side of the paper.
Gaye (Fort Collins) liked the shine of this origami paper and wanted to use it up!
Haley (Fort Collins) painted the pages of the daily newspaper while at the Work Party in early April. Then she cut many varying sizes of flowers out to layer them into these flower designs.
The idea for my cards came from the movie Bright Star (a most beautifully styled, artful film) and I got to use my fancy new Cricut Explore Air cutting machine to cut out all the parts. After they were cut, all I had to do was glue, fold, color, and distress. (Sorry, by the way for the tight-fitting envelopes!)
Jane (Fort Collins) is a painter and each year she makes up sets of cards of all the paintings she did using Vistaprint. This is the first year she's shared some of them in the card swap.
Jessica works and makes her art at Wolverine Publick House and Printing Press here in Fort Collins. This was her first year in the swap! She was fun to meet and her cards lent some honesty/humor to the sentiments.
Jessie (Fort Collins) came to the Work Party and found inspiration in a piece of paper that's been hanging in my studio for months. The paper is covered in hot air balloons. She took that theme and made each part of the image out of words. (See a fun photo of Jessie holding a potato cannon at the end of this post!)
Laura (Fort Collins) has a way with magazine pages. She hates to get rid of the beautiful photography in the magazines she subscribes to, and we are lucky to see some of her re-purposing. She wove these strips together into dynamic new images.
I met Marge at a Fort Collins Hotdish event this winter and we hit it off. When she told me that she'd recently tried out some new-to-her medium, I suggested she join in our swap. She went to town and made tons of cards. When I went to pick up her ten, she showed me a cupboard full of cards! When I went back to deliver her kitty, she said that just in that short space of time, her "style" had developed. Can't wait to see next year's contributions!
Mary Lu (Fort Collins) has been on some journeys of the heart and soul these last few years, including an actual road trip in Washington state. This year she'll be road-tripping on her own for the first time, so her cards were inspired by maps and being grounded and ebbs and flows.
Susan's cards were inspired by newspaper headlines from events in Colorado in the last year. Her collages were individual and thoughtful. She's from Fort Collins.
Andrea (Fort Collins) joked about how the Happy Birthday vellum has popped up in her cards for at least three years. She liked the extra challenge of making pop-up cards, and making them so large helped use up a lot of her supplies.
Anne is from Seattle and has used fortunes in her cards before. I was amazed that to make these, she must have collected hundreds, especially as the fortunes chosen for each card seemed to relate to each other in a quirky way.
Annie (Fort Collins) made her adorable fiber collages and threw in some meaningful words to accompany them.
Ambra (Toronto) embellished some cute owl cards, which got caught up in customs because of the feathers!! Nothing liquid, fragile, perishable, or hazardous here, people!
Joanne is my new next door neighbor here in the Fort. This print-out of tulips is of a painting she did from a photograph of some tulips in her garden! Inside, there is a fun play on words (think: two lips); she says if you want to change the message, you can! The message is written on chalkboard paper with chalkboard pen. You can just wipe it away and write a new message with such a pen, $3 at Michael's.
Katie (Fort Collins) made this bee-on-a-flower with a hand-cut stencil and watercolors. The bee spins around on its flower. Inside: Happy B-day! Haha!
Mia (Fort Collins) shared her stellar hand-writing skills in her card design, and played with brightly-colored papers against black card.
Sarah (from San Diego) participated this year for the first time and her cards cleverly incorporated both themes. The text on the fronts was endearing, and inside you find a removable bookmark to remind a friend of how great you think they are.
Shari (Fort Collins) subscribes to a monthly stamping club, and these cards were put together with some of the supplies she got one month from them.
Siri (College Town, PA) has an eye for fabrics! She used some of her scraps to make these heart cards and the surprise: heart confetti to be included in the envelope!
Sophia was recruited into the swap this year by Claudia and her simple collaged images packed a lot of punch. I hope I'm remembering right that she's from Maryland.
Phuong is from Cambridge, MA, and made these cards with her almost-three year-old daughter. They like to stencil together--it's like magic when you take the stencil away to reveal the shape!
A few last photos, from the Work Party, the photo-taking, and the distribution day. That's Jessie having a go with my husband's potato cannon, which he was entertaining Andrea's kids with during the Work Party. Thanks in particular to Katie (who helped with the photography) and Haley and her 4-y.o. Harper, who carefully hand-selected each card for many of you. :)
