or How I hand painted this fabric.
Fabric painting – this post comes with a warning.
Fabric painting is hugely fun and addictive. Once you start painting your own fabric do not hold me responsible when you can’t stop!
What’s not to love about designing your own unique fabric? The paint was only £3 a pot and the brushes were about £5. If you work on stash fabrics or a pre-loved garment it’s potentially a very inexpensive way to update or create a really special garment.
Now, I’m just going to pre-face this post by saying I am not an expert at fabric painting or surface decoration. I got an idea into my head, thought about it quite a lot, bought the fabric paint and slapped it on some fabric.
Fabric Painting – Tools + Equipment
- Fabric Paint in Royal Blue from Handprinted. I bought 3 pots, and used every single drop to paint the fabric for a full skirt.
- Paint brushes from Søstrene Grene
- Plastic sheets
- Masking tape/brown paper tape
- Frixon pens/fabric marker/ do a test for your fabric!
Protect The Area
No polite way of saying this – I am a messy worker. So protect the area and yourself. I covered or moved anything I didn’t want paint on and wore old clothes and an apron.
Protect your table as the paint will bleed through fabric. I taped old plastic wrappings that we had kept from fabric deliveries to the table.
Test Piece
I was a bit impatient to start painting and didn’t really have time to clear everything and paint-proof. So I did a quick test first on some scrap fabric to scratch the itch and to get a feeling for the brush stokes and how heavy/dense I wanted the strokes to look. I did a vague design by drawing with a Sharpie on pattern paper, which I could see through the fabric and gave me a guideline to follow. The ink did bleed through the fabric, rather obvious but reminded me of the need for plastic underneath the fabric. I’m not sure if the Sharpie plan was a good one, I have a niggling feeling the black sharpie ink could transfer to the fabric during fabric painting.
Fabric Painting Prep
I washed and ironed the fabric before laying it flat and wrinkle free on the table. Taped it down and made sure to keep it on grain. And, bonus points to me, I remembered to lint roller it. And remembered to put plastic sheets over the areas of fabric I wasn’t painting at the time to protect them from paint splatters. Because, as we have established, I’m messy. You could use a hairdryer to dry the paint a bit quicker but I didn’t have one with me.
I want to Paint It Black Blue
So my plan had always been to paint the fabric specifically for a Bloom Skirt, so I took quite a while to draw the skirt pattern pieces directly onto the fabric. I can recommend doing this if you are thinking of doing any kind of print placement. After which I marked a design/guidelines directly on the fabric with a Frixon pen so I could avoid crossing patterns over seams and having to pattern match at the zip and kind of line up the ‘stripes’. It was a bit vague and I didn’t follow it very precisely, and the pen did come off with the iron later.
I knew wanted a hand painted, painterly effect so you could see the brush marks, but sharp and graphic too. In the end I just starting painting and decided not to overthink it any further, not at all usual for me the queen of overthinking. That’s my best bit of advice, just start painting and don’t try to control the result too much. I played with different thickness of brushes and pressure for a variety of brushstrokes and just enjoyed the process.
And then patiently (again, highly unusual for me as I was a bit excited at this point) left it to dry overnight before I could move it to make room to paint the other bits of fabric. By this point, I was having such a jolly time I’m ready to paint anything and everything blue.
Fixing The Fabric Paint
Once dry, the fabric paint needs ironing to fix it.
So, I did a shout out on Insta as I wasn’t sure how long to iron for (it’s 2 weeks later at this point and I’d thrown away the pots) and there was lots of great advice given in the comments of the reel HERE.
There was a few suggestions to use a tumble dryer, but I don’t have one, but do have a menopausal shoulder so ironed it for as long as I could be bothered while listening to a podcast. Keep in mind this is a sample skirt for The Bloom Skirt pattern so I’m probably not going to wash and wear it as much as normal garment (if at all). I can’t confirm how it will wash at this stage but I’d suggest being a little more pedantic about fixing it correctly than I was!
My top tip would be to check your iron is actually still clean after not only pressing the fabric but after making said skirt because the ink transferred to the bottom of the iron and then onto some white linen. Totally my fault, I was very slapdash about using a pressing cloth and fixing the paint and checking the iron was still clean which is actually quite an obvious thing to check when pressing freshly painted bright blue fabric paint!
Overall, I’m delighted how the fabric turned out and looking forward to painting more at some point. Give it a try, it’s great fun!
*The Bloom Skirt is coming soon!
