Making art aprons with STITCH

Detail from my "art apron" from our STITCH play day.

Last week, STITCH had our annual summer play day at Andrea's house on Anderson Island. It's always a fun adventure because it starts and ends with a ferry ride, has a potluck in the middle, and the surface design activity is interspersed with kicking back and taking in the peaceful view over the water.

This year we made art aprons with fabric paint and piles of brushes, brayers, stamps, stencils, markers and found objects. Here we are with our aprons at the end of the day, although we're going to continue embellishing them at home. 

Once on the island, we relaxed with coffee and Andrea's scones and homemade blackberry jam. Anne modeled her necklace from Holland and bracelet from Denmark that were made with tires. The fabulous top is from San Francisco.

Even her feet were styling with hand-knit socks.

Then we started our project. I got the idea from a blogger friend, Lynda: painting-my-new-apron. And she got the idea from LuAnn Kessi and this post: messy-painted-aprons.html. That group painted their aprons in five layers, but we just did a quick background layer and then went crazy for a couple of hours with the other supplies.

For the background, we watered down transparent Setacolor fabric paint and swiped it on with big sponge and bristle brushes. Some of us added splatters. You could also use acrylic paints from the craft store.

Linda and Carol applying the first layer.

While that layer dried, we broke for lunch. Everything was so good!

Then we set to work with thicker paint and ink that we applied with found items (like the rim of a cup for circles, bubblewrap and potato mashers), foam stamps, stencils, sponges, carved brayers, etc. 

White and black paint made it snappy. Linda used a black permanent marker for her flowers, above. Andrea used a thermofax screen for Tweety Bird.

Here are some of the others toward the end of the day:

While the final layers dried, we dug into the peach raspberry pie that I made ...

... and listened to Andrea's beautiful music.

After I got home, I used black and white Posca paint pens (ordered on Amazon) to add some finer details. They are more opaque than the jelly pens that I also tried.

Then I sponged on Lumiere metallic pink paint to give it some highlights.

Linda also fine-tuned hers:

Have a colorful day