Painting Sky Fabric for the Beauties

There's Kali helping me out!

So with this week, I continued on with building my Bathing Beauties.  After taking a couple of days just sketching them out, they were finally ready to get into a full size pattern.  I like working with a full size pattern, not usually so that my finished quilt looks like the picture, but just  that it keeps me going in the right direction.  Its easier for me to picture the actual size of things with the pattern in front of me.  I go "ole skool" and just use an overhead projector and brown packing paper.  As an aside, my husband  and I bought a monster roll of this paper 21 years ago for 20 bucks at a party store.  We use it all the time for all sorts of projects and we're only half way through it.  We call it the loaves & fishes paper, but for my Jewish friends you can call it oil lamp paper :)

Sorry - I digress - LOL - with the pattern done I thought I started panting the sky.  I got out my Mickey Lawler's book  tried painting sky.  Now let me tell you, she makes it look so easy and I'm quite sure it is. . . . . but for me it took a few tries to get the sky I wanted right!


The first one was way to heavy and just ridiculously awful!

 So I figured out that you need to work the whole length of the fabric across so you don't get the line down the middle.  I also added way more water and a bit of purple - 'cause I love purple.  The second was a lot better but still too blue in the end and heavy looking.  And yes that's me painting fabric in my sewing hole - I wouldn't recommend it since I still managed to get blue paint on things!



Finally the third was much better - I put half and half wet fabric - put a ton of water in the paint and added more purple.  It came out great!  Then - since it was so great - I cut it up! (That's what quilters do after all - take perfectly good fabric and cut it up only to spend hours sewing it back together!)  I still haven't gotten it sewn yet since my Godmother Betty is here for a visit but its on my list of things to do!

 

And this is how its going to be sewn together this week!