Fly away ...

Well, this post has taken a teeny bit longer than anticipated to get on the screen! I was about to start when my dad skyped me, so we had a good yarn and caught up with news. Very lovely. Didn't really delay the post that much though in that I had intended to do this one yesterday, but got very tired and went to bed early - ahh! Anyway, better late than never.

This is my attempt at painting fabric which will then be used to make bags. I've got one on my mind at the moment, also in my art journal that is going to showcase my travels around the world - I've got badges and patches from when I was a little girl in Devon to some collected more recently on my travels. Today I was even designing the bag I'm going to embellish so tomorrow will entail making up the bag in some calico to see if it's workable. Original creativity at last!

Technical details: I've used my normal acrylic but mixed it with textile medium (Jo Sonja do a good one)and painted onto calico. After letting it dry for 24 hours, the fabric needs to be ironed to set the medium and away you go. I applied the paint with a small foam roller - inspired by my house painting a couple of weeks ago. The white splatter marks were accidental in that they were due to the white acrylic being rather old and stodgy, which didn't allow it to mix properly with the blue, rather the white blobs got squished by the roller and made the amazing, unexpected cloudy effect I was seeking. Don't you just love it when you find something you've forgotten about, at just the right time? The red flight lines are made using some fabric paints I was given by a friend ages ago and I'd not used them before. They come in a tube but are used like a big biro - they're by Hobbytex, I'm not even sure if you can get them anymore, but probably worth Googling! I borrowed my son's sponge stampers to create the plane shapes. Can't wait to see what I go on to create - it's still a surprise to me - I love that about creating, I often don't know what I'll get until I get it! Magic ...