Cute Little “Nautical” Quilt Blocks!

Aloha, all!

     Yes, it does seem as if I've done more swaps this year than I have in years past.  The reason is that it's been awhile since I've been active in a group where swaps are common, AND where the people who belong to the groups are really good paper-crafters. Believe me, I'm all for helping out and teaching those who are just learning.  After, all I teach paper crafts myself!  But when it comes to swapping, I do like to trade with people who are at least as skillful as I am – I want to end up with projects that I can show off to my customers and students to make them want to learn and practice more!

     So here I am showing off the project that I made for another swap.  The project is called an "Artist's Trading Card" or ATC.  These are little gems of paper crafting design that are just 2" x 3-1/2" – the size of your typical trading card.  Oh, I'm sure you can imagine stamping a little design on such a small piece of paper.  But an ATC has to be more than that.  It should be a complete project that stands entirely by itself.  Look at a standard sized greeting card with all kinds of embellishments, and imagine that in an ATC size.  This is not easy!

     My project for this swap was a "Quilt Block" design, similar to those I have been using for greeting card projects.  But to get such a design into an ATC, I had to make really small pieces!  After trying quite a few ways to get this done, I decided that the light "pieces" weren't going to be individual pieces.  Instead I constructed the quilt pattern with the lighter colored paper as a background and I cut the blue and red pieces and laid them down as I usually do. 

     Not only that, I did not construct each ATC design separately.  I made a whole sheet of them.  Once I got all the individual pieces of red and blue glued down (I used Crystal Effects for this), I used a Basic Gray Stampin' Write Marker to draw the lines to define the triangle-shaped "pieces" of the lighter color.  Then I cut out the motif for each card from the sheet and then embossed them with the Square Lattice Embossing Folder.  Here's the project a little less than half way through. 

     You can see that I outlined all of the squares and triangles with a bit of pencil.  The triangles covered most of the pencil; any that still showed through were eventually hidden by the shadows created when I embossed the final blocks.

     I mounted each square first on some Cherry Cobbler Card Stock (the red color) and then on Not Quite Navy (the blue color).  I tied some Cherry Cobbler/White Baker's Twine around the Cherry Cobbler Layer before adhering it to the Not Quite Navy Layer.  For the final touch, I added a Cherry Cobbler Brad in the center of each square!

     Later this week I'll share some of the ATCs that I received in trade for mine!  Meanwhile, here's the pattern that I used to make these little gems.