Next time, pick a standard size

Remember the dabbling I did with paint and fabric? When I penciled in the grid I used to keep everything somewhat lined up, I used 6 x 6 inch squares—10 altogether, two to a row with five rows.

Only 6 x 6 inches is not at all a standard size for frames. Nor is 12 x 12. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist but holy moly a non-standard frame can get pricey in a hurry.

I managed to find a 12 x 12 frame at Michael’s and with a 40% off coupon, the price was somewhat reasonable. Here’s what the final/final product looks like.

Next time I paint fabric to frame—if there is a next time—I’m going to measure and use a standard frame size for the painting.

Been dabbling

In paint. I’ve read some blog posts that describe painting fabric (often silk) for clothing, not décor, and I’ve been interested in trying that myself. But I sure didn’t want to spend the cash on silk only to have my efforts look like total amateur hour. So I got some cheap cotton cloth at IKEA, bought some paints with a bit of metallic in them that were billed as being suitable for fabric painting, and gathered up some other paints I had on hand for painting cards (you know, like Christmas cards). I had a set of cheap brushes and figured for this attempt, they would have to do.

I will say that if I go any further with painting on fabric, I’ll need better brushes. These were horrible—the bristles wanted to splay out and shed, which created texture I didn’t want. The paints for cards were OK, nothing you’d want to use on clothing fabric, but for this experiment they were adequate.

I penciled in a grid on the fabric, and then over the course of several weekends (and until today, only when it was sunny outside in hopes of better light), started painting random squares, rectangles and lines. I was going for a randomized stained-glass effect, so if you are trying to identify a pattern, you can stop. There isn’t one!

Today, I outlined each grid with black, and this is where better brushes would have helped. As it is, I console myself with thinking that it looks like the hand soldering you’d see in stained glass made by someone who is not an expert.