Stayed Up Late Making ATCs

The other night I had a meeting in my home. I was then wide awake (and happy) and decided that rather than go watch TV in bed or read a book, I'd take advantage of the alone time and make some ATCs for a swap.

The swap is called, "Vintage, Pen, Paper and Ink" and requires the use of vintage papers such as receipts, lists and letters.

I am using old papers from my great-grandmother, grandmother and my grandfather. I made collages out of the papers.

I was not happy with some of the ones that I had made for this swap, previously. The problem is that I was using a lot of old lists (on white paper) and on old cash register receipts. Therefore the collages had either a lot of white or a lot of yellowing old paper color (read: boring).

I decided to try and spice up some of the old ones.

On one card I used acrylic paint mixed with water to make the paint more transparent. I painted over some of the white papers. I didn't think this looked very good or interesting. Oh well.

On another card I colored different segments with chalk pastels. I then used water on a paintbrush on top of that to make the color more deep. It looks very much like paint.

I then went to my box of papers and began looking at bunches of receipts and lists from the 1970s. I was thinking about how the papers were mostly white and boring. Then I noticed that some papers were colored. I had the idea to make a rainbow type of design.

I didn't have any red papers but I had about every other color of the rainbow plus pink. I layered the paper on a vertically positioned ATC and made stripes of rainbow colors. Due to the size of the ATC each layer was only about 1/2 inch high.

I liked that card so much that I made a second one.

I then had an idea to make a picture out of the papers. This idea came from looking at a green bank envelope and thinking it was the same color as a flower stem. I then selected a background card I made last month, with watercolor paints on watercolor paper. The color of the background was a dark pink. Using freehand scissor cutting I fashioned a stem and leaves. I chose a black color for the center of the daisy-shaped flower. I used a pale pink auto repair receipt from 1975 for petals. At first I tried drawing the petals and cutting them out but that was a pain in the neck so I just cut them freehand. I then glued down the papers and I loved the ATC so much that I decided to keep that one. By the time I finished that one it was nearly 1 in the morning and I was dead tired (or else I would have made a whole series of these flowers).