back to swappin' ATCs

I dropped out of the swap thang for a while. Too much to do moving, etc, but I miss the direction and the deadlines, soa few weeks ago I trolled ATCSFORALL.com until I found a few I liked.

This first set required that you (1) make a watercolor background, then (2) stamp with a stamp that had some open areas. I didn't really have anything like that, so I used this circular month stamp 3 times to create open areas. Then you had to (3) zentangle in the spaces, then (4) shade and highlight the tangles.

For the background, I ran drips of yellow and aqua the long way down a large sheet of watercolor paper, dried it, then ran more drips the short way of blues and greens. Gave it a few sprays of water here and there to help with the dripping and ended up with a sort of plaid pattern. Loved it. My watercolor efforts often usually almost always fall short of my expectations, but I liked this one a lot.

Stamped the stamp, spent a few evenings tangling away, did a lot of shading and a bit of highlighting, and called it good. I'm not the world's greatest zentangler but I enjoy it and had fun with these.


I used more of the same paper for a theme that required you to use a time piece somewhere on the ATC.

put a bit of tea bag over the 'long gone' text to fade it out a little

I stamped a large clock face partially off the card, then pasted a torn piece of used tea bag over it to soften the edges. I had some gel medium transfers laying around and used those. I drew around most of them with markers of various kinds, just sort of playing. Added a bit of washi tape at lower right. Found some text that went with each image. Did a bit of inking on text and edges.

Slathered some gloss varnish over them to protect the fragile pieces.

At first I wasn't real sure about the vintage images on the modern looking watercolor background but now I like the juxtaposition.

the text is part of a label from vintage embroidery thread

no, I don't know why she's apprehensive, she just looks it

This one's a little different in that I auditioned a background stamp of clock faces
before deciding not to use it on all of them. The woman is layered over some paper
from the back of a photo of a dead child that my MIL gave me years ago.
She was the daughter of a grandmother's sister or something. Neat paper.