After a decade of putting stuff aside......

More so in the past than now, art galleries and museums were in the habit of sending out lots of postcards to announce new shows and exhibits.  I was on the mailing list for several places, and maybe ten years ago I started to save all the cards.  Carefully stashed them in nicely labeled boxes and thought that someday I would make art with them.

At the last meeting of my art group, the monthly prompt was "postage stamps."  After a great evening of looking at mail and stamp projects of many different sorts, I was reminded of my old idea of using those art show cards.

Kathleen Loomis, Memorial Day, 2008, Quilts Japan Prize in Quilt National 09

I have made lots of what I call "postage stamp quilts" in which tiny quilts, about the size of stamps, are machine-sewed together into an open grid.  I've also made a couple from paper, which has the advantage of not requiring the time-consuming quilting before you get to sewing the pieces together.

Fortunately the postcards were right there on the shelf, in pleasant contrast to other art materials that I know I own but can't find without serious searching.

After several days of cutting, I got to the sorting stage:

I had first thought to just sew everything together into one huge grid, but then realized that first, one huge grid would be harder to sew, harder to hang and less appealing to purchase.  And second, that the bits of card had many different kinds of imagery and I could find smaller theme groupings that would be more interesting.

So here is the start of a grid of hard-edged graphics, mostly orange and blue:

And here's a finished grid of little landscape scenes:

Sorry for the glare -- it's impossible to take a decent photo because the glossy card stock is so reflective.  Fortunately these pieces don't need to be photographed for jurors -- they can go straight to the wall for my show this summer.