I suddenly realised that I hadn’t been showing the postcards I have been creating for the Calendar Girls 2008 swap so here they are.
If you go to the Calendar Girls 2008 blogspot you can see the techniques I used to create the January, February and March postcard plus you can also see the wonderful postcards the other group members have created using very diverse techniques.
Not only have they all been blogged about but Susan has put a slide show in the sidebar so that you can view all the postcards made so far in month order.

This is my January postcard along with the original calendar picture. You can find details of the technique I used here.
Details of the February postcard can be found here.
And the March postcard detailing the techniques used is here.

This is the calendar picture for April.
And this is the postcard I have created for April. We don’t start to post on the blog until the 1st of each new month so this one isn’t on there yet.
My swap partner for April is FaeryDi. Dianne loves fairies and although they don’t appear in any of the calendar pictures I ‘pinched’ the idea from one that Joanna made for Dianne.
On its own you may be wondering where on earth I was coming from, but if you scroll to the end of this blog posting you can see that if you put it next to the April picture you can see where I have taken some of the elements from for the design.

I started with this book which I bought some time ago.
And found a picture I had drawn of one of the fairies detailed inside.
I scanned this into Photoshop and changed it using the photocopy filter.
I then filled the dress in with the colour red.
I scanned the original April picture and cut and pasted one of the flowers and a heart.
The heart was easy. I just copied and pasted a few here and there.
The flower was a little more difficult. I had to cut and paste the centre and each petal separately and paste it into position, re-sizing it at the same time.

When I was happy with the finished design I used the inkjet printer to print on to heavyweight Lutradur.
I used the graduated paint fill to print onto Tyvek paper.
This was placed over a piece of Pelmet Vilene and the Lutradur print was put on top.
I then stitched organza in red onto the dress and hearts and used a crystal organza for the wings.
I was a bit disappointed with the flower in the hair – its very difficult to see clearly. The inkjet colours tended to bleed into each other. I tried another flower to place on top out of coloured Tyvek but discounted the idea as it tended to make the facial features fade away. I thought about stitching organza on top as I had done with the dress and hearts but its such a small fiddly shape I decided that wasn’t such a good idea either. So in the end I just left it as it was.

This is now on its way to Dianne and I do hope she likes it.
Does anyone know if you can use Lutradur with a laser printer? I wondered if it would stop the colours bleeding.