Suffering for It

I've had this crazy idea in my head for ages and when I realised Hazel's birthday was coming up I decided it needed to come out of there. Card making is all the rage around here and over in the US as well, I gather, but I've never been that excited about making cards with paper. I much prefer the tactile qualities of fabrics and I had some vague ideas about using fabric to make a birthday greeting.

For Hazel, who is good at making me laugh, I wanted bright cheery colours. I decided on the wording. I thought about flowers or other decorations, but decided to Keep It Simple. I looked at all the fonts in Word and chose



the ones I liked best either because the shapes were pretty or because I thought they were practical; you might guess that the latter won out in the end. (Ever thought about how squirmy the letter 'e' is?)

I wanted to use the sewing machine but didn't trust that I could make it do what I wanted. The hand sewing didn't take much longer than sew-rip out, sew-rip out in the end. The shiny silk crepe and the thick cotton velvet turned out to be just as difficult as ever to work with. I wasn't confident about putting together the whole thing -- I have no 3-D brain function and so I had a number of false starts. Even the skill about which I was most confident -- embroidery -- didn't serve me as well as I hoped; it's been at least 10 years since I did any and trying to write the words on the shiny fabric was a nightmare.

For a while I questioned whether Hazel was just going to get a store bought paper card after all. It was useful to remember why I wanted to make this for Hazel: she's lovely and funny, not the picky critical type at all. I knew she would see the love and the work that went into the project. The worst that could happen is that she would laugh at it -- not a bad thing at all, making someone laugh on their birthday -- and so I persevered.

On the day it needed to be done and delivered -- no way was I trusting this baby to Royal Mail -- I woke up with ideas for some improvements. I made them in a step-wise fashion so that I could change my mind and put it back the way it was originally finished. I would do a 'tutorial' on this -- like you see on crafty blogs -- but at this stage I think it would be more of a 'notu-torial'.


As I knew I would, I learned a lot doing this and would take a totally different approach on the next one -- if there is a next one...


One thing I will remember: once I gave up on the concept of 'elegant' and moved on to 'fun', it got a lot easier. I decided I wasn't doing craft, this was ART -- and we all know what rubbish artists get away with!