Halloween Fabric Postcard

My Modern Quilt Guild has neat activities throughout the year.  This Halloween we were invited to participate in a fabric postcard swap with another Modern Quilt Guild.

This summer I moved my sewing room from upstairs to downstairs.  Now I share the room with a lot of existing craft and office supply stuff.  There still needs to be a fair amount of reorganization and purging.

Due to the state of my sewing area, I have not been doing much sewing.  Certainly not any large projects.  But I signed up for the postcard swap anyway.

The goal of the postcards is for it to be a quick project.  I had an idea, but it wasn't until my recipients' postcard arrived in the mail did I get started.

First I looked for the stiff interfacing.  I know I have some from the last time I made fabric postcards, but I could not find it anywhere!  Plan B was to just use three layers of somewhat stiff interfacing and hope for the best.

It all worked out fine.  I am certainly influenced by the little people in my life and went with 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate.

Fabric Mailbox and More Postcards

My daughters love the fabric postcards I've been making.  I toyed with the idea of making a fabric mailbox, but wasn't sure.












This week, my younger daughter requested a snowman postcard.  It came out so cute, I made a few more.  Now that my daughter had two of her very own postcards, I decided to try out a fabric mailbox.

I found a couple tutorials I liked.  I loosely followed this mailbox tutorial.  I had seen another tutorial that used a button for the flag and velcro at the door and liked those features.  

Fortunately I had the plastic canvas at home already as I hoped to make a fabric dollhouse at some point.  I determined the size by taking one of my 4"x6" postcards and making it a bit bigger.  Then, I shaped a mailbox shape and, along with a helper, traced the shape onto paper.  This became the front and back flaps.  Then I used the width of the flaps for the bottom piece.  

I laid everything out together with small spaces between the plastic and cut out some fabric.  I added thin craft batting to the outside layer of fabric.  The inside is felt.  I forgot to add the velcro to the top of the mailbox when I was sewing everything together.  It worked out fine to rip out a few stitches and insert it in.  That made it easy to get the right placement.

For the flag, I just cut some felt about the right size (2 layers) and then cut some plastic canvas a bit smaller.  I did a zigzag stitch around the outside.  For the button, I just cut a small slit in the flag through all the layers.  Then when I sewed the button on, I was careful to have every stitch go through the slit.  It was a little tricky, but made for nice stiff flag.

My girls love the mailbox and another has been requested.  We will see.

Fabric Postcards

At my local Modern Quilt Guild meeting, I learned about fabric postcards.  Back in 2010 when I had my third baby, I actually received a fabric postcard from a friend and was quite impressed with it.  The details, the ability to travel in the mail and the cute factor stood out to me.

I never really considered making my own fabric postcards until at our meeting we decided to draw names and make and send one postcard out for Valentine's Day.  Once I got started with making the one, I didn't want to stop.  They are fun to make and due to their size, a small canvas for trying new things.

For this project, I did purchase Peltex, a stiff interfacing, and a postcard rubber stamp.  Both items I found at Hobby Lobby.  The Peltex they had is fusible on both sides.  I read later that this might be a disadvantage, but it seemed to work well for me.

I did a combination of sewing parts together and also just layering fabrics.  Then after fusing the top layer to the Peltex, I quilted on top to hold everything together.  Finding ribbons and small scraps of fabrics for embellishments was fun too.

After completing the top and quilting, I cut a piece of white fabric and fused it to the back of the postcard.  If I didn't iron too long on the front, the fusible back didn't seem to get activated until I ironed on the back.  Once all the layers were together, I did a satin stitch around the outside once more slowly and a second time faster.  Then using my new rubber stamp, I stamped "Postcard" on the back.

I have read different things about how to mail these.  First class postage seems to work ok, hand stamping at the post office is often recommended.  Some use thin cello bags to protect the mini quilts during shipping.  Because I didn't use any beads or sequins, I think sending them alone may be fine.  Hopefully they will all reach their destinations!