Keys ATC Nov 2009, The Artist Trading Club

Keys have been a very popular challenge theme in the last few months.
As I have already done Keys for the ABAA challenge in September I tried to think about keys from a different angle.
OK, so what phrases refer to keys.
Key to my heart.
Key to the door. And......

A few days pass and...... Nope, no more ideas were forthcoming.
That is pretty rubbish on the ideas front don't you think?

So I gave that up and went back to rabbits and hidden keys and had a ball dreaming these ones up.

Have you heard about the latest craze that is sweeping the country this Christmas?
Santa's Elves have been working day and night to meet the demand for flying keys and not just any keys; these are magic keys that only rabbits can fly.
Up and down the country hutches and warrens have been buzzing with excitement over the prospect of what will be lurking in Santa's sacks.

Flying Key Fever is making newspaper headlines and causing many mother rabbits considerable anxiety and sleepless nights over potentially limited stock (you didn't really think this was just a human condition did you?).

A fortunate few rabbits are already whizzing around the skies showing off to anyone who will watch them. I was lucky enough to be out with my camera and managed to capture a few of their antics in pixels.











Then I made another butterfly with a key body.




I found an image of a cute red squirrel. I love red squirrels (well just about any animal with fur or feathers really).
So this squirrel called Bob has buried his flying key to wait for the 24th December and hopes to dig it up and sell it for a fortune in nuts to some poor, nearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, "gotta get a flying key" Rabbit. That is of course if he can find it again.



Then I noticed Julia peeping through her keyhole and low and behold Lloyd Grossman's show "Through the keyhole" popped into my head.
Come on all together now "Who lives in a house like this?"

Apparently he puts that accent on, it's not real, so Himself informs me. Now I could understand him doing this if he was a comedian, to give himself a memorable uniqueness, but he's not a comedian, he's a food critic and cook. Just shows you how little I know about the limelight and the media.

Cop a load of how out of focus this picture is, I blame my camera of course, it couldn't possibly have been me.
Oh! and on this one I thought I would finish it off with a blanket stitch border, it was AFTER I had bodged the holes in it that I realised I couldn't actually remember how to do blanket stitch which was so incredibly handy I had to do a little dance.
I got out a sewing book, but the written description of just how to do this stitch might have been written in Swahili for all the sense I could make of it, so I had to wing it and invent a new stitch called the Schmare Stitch.

Named in Tribute to the late great Jack Lemmon for his fantasmagorical performance as Felix Ungar in the Odd Couple and that wonderful scene of him having a sinus attack in the coffee shop - schmaaaare, schm, schm, schmare. (Who needs Meg Ryan doing her "thing" in a coffee shop when we have Jack...)
You can watch this scene on you tube if you like :-)

Presenting the Schmare stitch -
which as you can see is quite badly untidy, but it's a new stitch and I haven't got it polished to perfection yet :-)




I did finally come up with something for "The key to my heart" and took yet another awful picture of it with that temperamental camera of mine, which I think was having it's own sinus attack today.




These two have absolutely nothing to do with this challenge (I could have been just a little bit wicked and just left them here and let you try and decide what they had to do with Keys. The answer of course being absolutely nothing, but I'm good, allegedly, Santa says so and his sacks are very full...)
I did wonder how much of a difference a central image can make to the same background, quite a lot seemingly.



Happy Crafting everyone!
Gini