Sunny Saturday Art-play

On a recent sunny Saturday, I set up a few tables in my backyard and brought a bunch of art supplies out to play... new stencils from The Crafter's Workshop, Pebeo Setacolor textile paints, sea salt, and a lot of mixing cups, sponge brushes & mixing sticks. I had several yards of PFD (prepared for dying) white fabric that I tore into 14" squares.

I mixed up small batches of the textile paints & used the sponge brush to apply it to a square of fabric - sometimes using a solid color, other times adding splotches of another color or applying a couple of colors in stripes. I then placed the wet fabric on another table & placed a stencil on top, gently pressing the stencil to the wet, paint saturated fabric. After an hour or so, I lifted the stencil & moved the fabric to the shade. The result was a perfect outline of the stencil design with the positive space in the original paint color & the negative space lighter, from its exposure to the sun. I sometimes threw on some sea salt which creates a lovely mottled effect.

I spent the entire day mixing up colors and playing with the stencils. I've wound up with a nice pile of fabrics to use in my next steps, overpainting and bleaching. I'm going to work on that over the next few days, I'll post pictures of some of the finished fabrics.

Great news for anyone looking for The Crafter's Workshop stencils, they are now being sold at both Michael's and A.C. Moore! You can see the full line and some inspirational photos and ideas at http://www.thecraftersworkshop.com/ . It is a wholesale company so you can't buy their products there but you will be able to find a list of where they are sold.

My next post will include pictures of the fabrics after I do some overpainting & bleaching. After that, I'll show you what I did with the fabrics!