It's been a long time since I posted!  But that doesn't mean I haven't been doing 'stuff'.
I have spent wayyyy too much time on my Steampunk postcards for PostmarkdArt.
Way too much time on something that could get lost in the mail.
I spent so much time driving around to get my 'parts' for the cards.  Luckily for me Archivers had a nice selection of steam punk and some of them were actually gears!  It looks like most of the other postcard traders also bought the same gears.  I spent time at Home Depot, many thrift stores, JoAnns, Michaels, etc.
I wanted gears, things to take apart, cheap books that had medical 'stuff' in them.  I wanted the type of medical books that have the clear plastic pages showing the different parts of the body.  I found one that only had the whole body.  But I still bought the book and ripped it apart.
So I gave up on that and decided to print my own.  Thankfully in my old couponing days I got free samples of 3M transparency sheets because when I looked for them at the office supply stores they are $60 for the smallest box!
Then I was looking for a copyright-free heart.  I spent way too much time searching the internet, and Dover Publishing.  No luck.  So these 6 hearts belong to some text lesson somewhere.
I printed the heart on the transparencies.  I wanted a blood red fabric for the background.  But then the transparency didn't show up. 
So I also printed the heart on photopaper, cut it out exactly, cut out the center, and colored the white edges to match the heart.  Putting that behind the transparency was perfect. 
I arranged my assorted gear paraphanalia so that it would fit in the cut opening of each of the 6 postcards.
I glued, then handstitched every little gizmo down to the red fabric, backed by interfacing.  I also cut apart the copper sheets I embossed and painted in my previous post.  I glued down the photopaper hearts.
Each postcard will still have timtex (pel-tex) in it I had to cut the center out to accomodate the thickness the gears and 'stuff' were adding to the postcard.  Since each of the 6 cards gears are different I had to cut out each one to match.  I never do anything the easy way!  I fused the red fabric with all the stuff on it to the tim-tex.  For the written side of the card I fused light blue fabric.
Then taking the medical textbooks I added a page and tore out where the heart goes.
Now to assemble them!
Lining up wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, but pounding the eyelets was.  The plastic and metal form you use to pound the eyelets with wasn't fool-proof.  Every one had to be checked and then hammered again to even it up.   I think it said something about 'pound lightly'...are you kidding?  I had to pound the crap out of it!
Then I trimmed them to 4 x 6" and I was relieved to be done!
Now on to van Gogh postcards: