My children are still young, but are now beyond the age of reading Alphabet books.  I was thinking last night about all of the alphabet books we read while they were little.  There were a lot of them!

My husband and I used to be able to recite some of their favorites by
heart.  "Big A, little A, What begins with A?  Aunt Annie’s Alligator,
A,A,A"  (From Dr. Seuss’s ABC).  Another favorite was Bob and Larry’s ABC’s (Bob and Larry being Veggietales characters).  It rhymed.  Thankfully, I seem to have forgotten it.

If you go search Amazon.com for "alphabet books"  you’ll get 4,692
results.  That is a lot of alphabet books.  They have been made on
every imaginable theme.  Some of our favorite books were ones that
didn’t use the same-old same-old words for each letter — which is why
Dr. Seuss was probably our favorite.  Of course, in some of the books,
the words they chose for some of the letters were a bit of a stretch,
but some of those letters are difficult!

So what, exactly, does this have to do with me and quiting or art even?  Well, I’m getting there:

Over the past 26 days, I have challenged myself to create a small
piece of work each day that was the size of a business card.  Because I needed something to guide me, I decided to start by going back to the basics — and work with the alphabet.

You can go one of two places to view all 26 of the cards.  I’ve been posting them (along with my photo of the day) in a separate blog:  http://saltcreek.typepad.com/365_days/

They are also in a photo album:  365 Art. 

Some days
I actually decorated a business card, other days, the work was created
digitally and sized appropriately before printing.  And towards the end
of the month, I challenged myself to make as many of them out of fiber
as I could.  For those, a layer fast-2-fuse interfacing was used as the
stabilizer in the center — it’s a thick stabilizer with fusible on
both sides.

As far as what I chose to depict, some days, my choice was obvious — A is for apple, for example.  But some days I tried to be clever, or didn’t actually put the letter of the day on the card.  For example, V is for Valentine, but the only text on that one is "Be Mine."

All in all, I’m happy with how this little project has gone.  I often find that as I drift off to sleep I’m thinking "OK, tomorrow’s letter is ‘Q,’ what am I going to do for that one…"  I tried to work quickly, but sometimes I got stuck.  Either my idea didn’t pan out, or my technique was lousy, or I just simply made things too hard.  I think I only "cheated" once — "T" was actually done the same day as "U", but I got busy….I’ve been very pleased with the fiber cards, and have gotten better at using the satin stitch.  I had originally planned that I would do business cards all year long, but I think I might like to try working a little bit bigger. 

A business card is 2 by 3.5.  ATCs are 2.5 by 3.5.  I’m not sure that extra half inch is enough bigger for me — but I don’t want to go too big, because I don’t want this to turn into a project that takes me all day long every day.   After I made my button wreath the other day, I had visions of making a small wreath every day, too.  That’s still a possibility….

I’m still contemplating. Tune in tomorrow to see what I decide!  (But don’t tune in until the end of the day, I’ll be out of town teaching a class).