Altered Playing Cards

This week, perhaps as a result of having such a clean desk, I've done LOTS of ATCs and several altered playing cards. The playing cards that I posted on ATCards.com have traded really fast. I've enjoyed making them, but I started to wonder -- how much do you need to alter something before you call it altered? The deck of cards that I've been "altering" is beautiful to begin with -- so it feels almost like cheating to use them. But just ALMOST :)


I got this deck of cards when my mom and I visited London a couple summers ago. We saw The Tempest in the new Globe and I picked up a deck of The Famous Shakespeare's Flowers Playing Cards as a souvenir of making it through standing up in the sun for an entire Shakespeare play. Each card has a painting of a different flower, plus a Shakespeare quote. At first I didn't want to even play with the cards because they looked so nice. I got over that, though!

One night I took the cards to someone's house and we played a Russian card game that doesn't use cards lower than 6. We took those cards out of the deck and then I completely forgot about them! I didn't see that person again (a friend of a friend of my husband's) so that left my lovely deck incomplete and unsuitable for any game other than durak.

When I saw a swap for altered playing cards on ATCards.com, I knew exactly which deck of cards I wanted to alter. I thought, if I can't play with them, I might as well paint them :) So I started altering these already pretty cards. First, I used sandpaper to scratch up the surface a bit. Then I used twinkling h2o paints to color the background. On some of the cards I used fine point pens to outline the flower paintings. I used ink over sequin waste to make some interesting circles. Then I used eyelets, gel pens, stickers, and a label maker to add some accents. I'm trading them in one-on-one trades and can't wait to build up a whole deck of altered cards!