I Heart You

Yes you! And all the lovely people who read this blog - I can hear you breathing out there you know ;) And I need your help with this post! A few weeks ago I came across this very cute tutorial for making a heart on a pillowcase with little dots of fabric paint and somehow, some way, I managed not to Pin it, or bookmark it or anything - just stowed it away in my memory and got the supplies. Of course, when I went to do it I couldn't find the webpage and just had to wing it based on my memory. So if you have seen this heart before and know where the tutorial is could you let me know so I can credit it properly?  Yay! The tutorial has been found and it's over at V and Co., thanks to Lyndsey and Jocelyn. It's a bit like Chinese whispers looking at my effort and the original - the things I'd remembered and forgotten.

The heart turned out very cute despite all that, my memory must be better than I realised (aside from the fact it was done on a tote bag in the original!).



It wasn't quite as easy as I'd thought, my technique with the end of the pencil was a bit lacking at the bottom and lots of the circles had no paint in the middle. Then I figured out that if you lightly dab dab dab it in the paint for each dot you get a much nicer circle. I also think I could have gone for less of the darker pink, but I was aiming for three colour changes as in the tutorial and was too timid with adding the white so my gradations weren't as obvious. I like the more subtle ombre effect of mine too though! One thing I did do is waste a lot of paint because I was adding white to the existing pink at each change and it takes a HECK of a lot of white to make an increasing amount of pink lighter! In the end I started scooping out a small amount of the pink and lightening that. I still went through most of a bottle of white paint before I figured that little trick out. And yes, I have a PhD, though in my defence it's in archaeology, not painting :P

This was the first time I'd used freezer paper and I'm a total convert! It was so easy to iron on and the edge, though not perfect, is pretty clean and sharp. I definitely need to try more stencilling with it.