A Couple New ATC Swaps

   Or maybe I should say a couple old ATC Swaps. Summer is the busiest time of the year for me. There is so much more to do. Living on a lake makes for so much more work. There is putting in the dock and boat. Once the boat goes in it is a constant chore to keep it clean. There is always debris on the shoreline to be raked out.  Most of the time there is a brush pile to cut up and burn. Then there are the flower gardens to be weeded. Not to mention the constant spraying for weeds in the yard. That is only the half of it. Living in Michigan summers are spent doing home maintenance and repairs that can't be done in the winter. While I'm doing these things the housekeeping is neglected. Then I find myself struggling to catch up on that. Then on top of that my little girl doggie was quite sick for more than a month. Anyone that has ever loved a dog knows how hard it is to have a sick furbaby. How you hover over and stress over them. It is hard to get much done other than nursing them. You might think that I didn't have time to get any art done. Somehow I did manage to join a few swaps. I just didn't have time to do any blog updates. That I'm working on now. The first swap that I would like to share with you is "Windows".

THIS IS MY WINDOW ATC

   A friend gave me a package of greeting cards from Flower Soft. They are cards that you cut out and layer and then apply flower soft to certain areas of the card. Looking through those I found the perfect card to use as my Window ATC. These are standard greeting card size so I had to re-size it and then print it out. After several tries I got it right. When I'm doing something like this I set my printer to black and white until I get it right. Then I print it out in color. I cut them out. There four layers counting the base. I applied Glossy Accents to the windows so that they would look more like glass. While I was waiting for the Glossy Accents to dry I matched paint to the color of the curtains and painted white card stock to be the wall the window was in. While that dried I put foam squares on the pieces and assembled the window. Then I applied Flower Soft to the flowers seen through the open window.  I centered the window on the painted card stock and glued it into place.

THESE ARE THE ATC'S I RECEIVED

 Sandie Hamel

Shirley Johnson

Kathy Keller

   The next swaps theme was "Lighthouses". I was hoping that one day there would be a lighthouse swap. I had three cancelled lighthouse stamps that I had saved. they were far to pretty to throw away.

THIS IS MY LIGHTHOUSE ATC

   I often saved cancelled stamps. So many are little works of art. I especially like them when the canceled stamp is straight across the stamp or miss it almost completely. This ATC is a collage of cancelled stamps. I cut an ATC size piece of white card stock. Then I applied glue using a glue stick to the back of each stamp and pressed them in place. I am sloppy with the glue stick letting the glue ooze out around the edges of the stamp. Then I sprinkled it with silver embossing powder and applied heat to set it. I love the molten metal look that I get with this technique. Then I applied blue glitter around the edge of the lighthouse stamp and using foam squares I put it in place.

THESE ARE THE ATC'S THAT I RECEIVED

Kathy Spitz

 Donna Staton

Connie Johnson

   I hope that you enjoyed seeing these ATC's as much as I enjoyed receiving them. Swapping ATC's is so much fun. It's like that saying "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." The one thing that you can be sure of is that you're going to love them.

Take Care

Kathy