Variety is the spice of (stitched) life ...

Postcards are a great way to use up smaller, unfinished pieces or stuff from the "I'll get to that later" but never do pile. I covered a piece of fusible webbing with acrylic paints - in bushfire colours - and bonded this to white acrylic felt. This was then cut into a number of postcard sized shapes - before I experimented with hand and machine stitching. The first card is stitched by hand, including the blanket stitched finish.

 

Some variations using machine stitching followed - including a free motion echo quilting around a basic shape or design (leaf) and a loose zig zag edge to finish ....

 

Another variation using straight lines of stitch - different spacing creates different perspectives - and for the central, densely stitched area I used a recalcitrant  metallic thread on the bobbin and stitched "upside down" with the right side of the postcard facing down, and using a dark thread on the reverse as a guide ...

 

Some free motion doodling or sketching - this time rock shapes as another way to create variety and texture while making the stitch as much of a focus as the background on which it is sewn.

 

The original layer of acrylic and felt was stamped with one of my very first lino cuts - an abstract leaf shape which has now been stitched, free motion, creating veins and lines ... the postcard was then edged with a dense zig zag (satin stitch) while the stitch length was varied - wide and narrow - for the four sides - this creates a less formal frame.