Eleanor's starfish

I think this starfish is so neat – I had no idea there was such a thing as a red starfish. And I had all these sea shells in my stash of things so it was great to use some of them. However, the shells make it totally impracticable for a postcard for mailing!!! I packed it with about 3 layers of bubble wrap. I didn’t have the post office date stamp this postcard – I figured they would freak out when they saw the little shells on the other side!!

The base of the postcard is hand painted lutradur. TransWeb was also hand painted and fused to the lutradur. Metallic and rayon threads were cut up and placed on the fused background. Fine pearl and silver glitter was sprinkled on the surface. A blue chiffon scarf fabric was then ironed over the fused background to entrap the embellishments. I used the lutradur in hopes it would be heavy enough to support the embroidery and then I would just cut edges to size without any further finishing, because the lutradur does not fray. However, it was still quite lightweight after fusing so I applied it to a cotton twill fabric backing and folded the edges over to finish.

The long leaves in the foreground are silk bonded to pellon then cut out with a heat tool so the edges will not ravel. Four layers of light turquoise tulle, cut in random shapes, were placed at the bottom of the card to add shadows to that area. The starfish was embroidered using DMC perle #5 in a detached buttonhole stitch. The embroidered starfish was then attached to background with sewing thread in order curve the ‘legs’.