ATCs and ABCs

Tonight I am flat out exhausted after attending graduation and then finishing the "move-out" process with my son. The weather was a bit overcast, but the ceremony was held outdoors so I could attend and hear him sing with the Chorale (if they move indoors, tickets are required). It is hard to believe that in just two more years he will be graduating.

While I was at graduation, I thought about the long path from preschool to college graduation and the basic building blocks that begin an education. The theme for one of my Artist Trading Card swap groups this month was "letters and numbers" and the card I did fits right into the education theme too.



When I was thinking about the theme, the song lyric "ABC, easy as 123" kept popping into my head so I decided those would be my letters and numbers (remember the Jackson 5 - for a link to a 1974 version of this song in a skit on the Carol Burnett show click HERE).

I used the Mini Monograms cartridge and welded together five circles and one square to create the design. You can see all of the cuts on the mat with the background removed above and below is a photo of the letters on the mat after the design was removed.



I made the letters and numbers alternate lines for a bit more interest. You need to be sure to save the centers of letters like "a" and "b" when you are using letters that are not the in the stencil format.



Above are my black cuts on a plain white piece of paper - I replaced the centers of the "a" and "b" but the tiny bits in the "3" were so small that I decided to skip them and let the "3" be extra loopy.



These were just not colorful enough so I added one inch punched circles in three kindergarten colors to back the openings. I staggered the placement of the colors.



Now my cuts were ready to be added to the cards. I cut the ATC cards in primary yellow and centered my letter and number cuts. They looked a bit bare so I added some pen stiching around the edges of the cards.



The group was small this month and I only needed to make seven.



For the backs, I added a 2 x 3 inch rectangle in black and wrote the information in white ink so it would look like a chalkboard.

(Tomorrow my son and I will drive back to Massachusetts and I have already warned him that I won't be doing any more box carrying - he can work on unloading the car with his Dad who is waiting for us back home! I will do my best to catch up with emails, comments and class registrations tomorrow night, but it may be late when we get back, so if not tomorrow....Monday!)