Santa Suit postcards

If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook this week you have seen these cards coming together. I've done one step every day since Friday and with about an hour a day I got 30 of them made.

This design isn't original. I wanted to do a card that would use up some of my collection of felt and started looking around for ideas. I found this one while perusing the greeting cards in Target. I knew it would not only be great for felt but would force me to cut into the new "vegan leather" that I bought last month. Years ago when I was sewing garments faux leather was very popular and fun to sew with. This stuff looks and sews exactly the same but I suppose it's a lot cooler to call it "vegan". Of course, I don't know what the vegans think about it being made from petroleum products. Seems that might be an issue too. 

But my Santa needed a nice belt and vegan leather is perfect even though I'm definitely not vegan. I an a little faux sometimes though.

I'm not going to give full instructions to make these because they are so easy but I will share a few tips. When I started sewing the belts on I realized that I had not gotten a teflon foot for my Brother sewing machine when I bought it 4 years ago. (I have one on order now.) The regular foot caused a lot of drag so I solved it by covering the belt in tissue paper and stitching through that. Then I ripped the paper off. It worked perfect!

I cut the white felt strips with my wavy rotary cutter blade. I rarely use that thing but I sure do love having it around for the few times I do use it. You can see here that I eye-balled the placement. I try not to get carried away with perfection when making postcards, especially when I'm doing 30 of them at a time!

I did a deep archaeological dive into the the stash for the belt fabric. This gold fabric is swimwear fabric and that means that it's 20+ years old! I knew I'd need that shiny gold fabric some day. It's perfect for my belt buckle! I ironed paper-backed fusible web to the back of it and drew the belt on the paper with a ruler and then cut them out. I fused these onto the card lightly before I top-stitched them with gold metallic thread.

Yesterday I finished them all off with a black serged edge. I think they turned out really cute and they came together quickly. I now have a total of 60 cards an only need 20 more. Hopefully I'll have them to share Monday. I'm in the mood to make some veterans quilts and that's keeping me focused to get the cards done first.