I made some ATC (Artist Trading Cards) today for the holidays and decided to add some ribbon to the tops of them so they could be hung on the tree or on a gift.

The first one has stamping on it, it’s a cute little snowman on a hill surrounded by trees and falling snow. There’s lots of glitter and a snowflake charm (from Close To My Heart) as well. I sewed the layers of paper together on my sewing machine.

 The next one is a beautiful vintage image of a little girl that I turned into an angel. I free hand cut some wings for her from some cool gold vellum and layered her onto some vintage sheet music. The letters for JOY were cut from an old book and there are also some glittery gold stars around her head.

The last one is a vintage image of three adorable siblings standing in a row and I added Santa hats to each of them. The background is vintage sheet music and there is a date stamped for 12/25/2008 along with black alphabet beads that say “Merry”.

I love the idea of using ATC’s for things other than just collecting, like hanging somewhere around the house, a book mark, gift tag or in a tiny frame.

I’ve made another batch of Halloween ATC’s. I made a brother for my little girl pumpkin fairy, a felt owl, the Headless Horseman jumping over hills, a Raven to go with Poe and another black cat, this one is under a piece of mica.

Here’s another ATC using scrapbook paper that looks like a map and some textured cardstock. I tore and layered them and then stamped the car stamp and words from Catlife Press over top.

Artist Trading Cards or ATC are small cards that are 2 1/2″x 3 1/2″ that were originally traded among collage artists to share ideas. But nowadays everyone has jumped on the ATC band wagon and you’ll find lots of “real” artists, rubber stampers and scrapbookers trading ATC’s as well. There are lots of places, especially on-line, where you can participate in ATC swaps and get some really wonderful little jems back.

Here are a couple of ATC that I’ve made. They both combine some collage ideas and rubber stamping. The first is made with an adorable “Bee Girl” stamp from Catslife Press. I stamped her on cardstock, colored her, cut her out, mounted her on some scrapbook paper from Basic Grey, stamped some letters and added some Sparkles Glitter Glue to her wings and antennae, very simple but very cute!

This next one was more complicated. I stamped the image of the girl with wings, from Peddlers Pack, and over stamped a wonderful quote from Emily Dickinson. I colored the image with pencils, added a few rhinestones and then dipped the entire ATC in beeswax. Which is why it was a little hard to photograph:) I used a small crock pot to melt my beeswax in and used a small pair of tweezers to quickly dip the piece in and out then let it dry. I love using beeswax in my collages and this is a really fun and different way to use it. I like buying the beeswax pellets from the craft store they melt quickly and when you are done you can let it cool inside the crock pot and then just turn it on when you are ready to use it again. Just don’t ever plan on cooking food it in though!! 🙂

Now, where to keep them? I like to store my ATC’s in a 3 ring notebook with plastic baseball card sleeves inside, you can find these at comic book, baseball card shops or on-line.

If you’d like some more ATC ideas there is a fantastic book called “Artist Trading Cards: An Anthology of ATC’s” published by Somerset Studio/Stampington & Co, I highly recommend it!

http://www.stampington.com/html/artist_trading_cards.html