My first attempt at putting a design on T-shirt material with fabric paint worked okay...sorta. The paint was a bit thick and as I dabbed it on with a makeup sponge, the fabric stuck to the sponge and pulled up through the stencil. It still worked, but I thought it would work better if I thinned the paint down with water.
With a new, larger stencil (found at my local home improvement center in the paint department), and some red pigment mixed with water, I tried again, and got...a blob of icky pink, in the vague outline of the stencil. The mixture was too thin, and the water bled under the stencil. And, alas, this blob was right on the front of my first tank top project. Wonderful, I thought, as I stared down at the nasty shade of pink. What the hell do I do now?
First, I let it dry. Then I thought, well, I'll just re-stencil the same design over the top of the blob, since most of it would be cut away anyway in a reverse applique. So, with a different color of paint (not my first choice on any of these colors, but I wanted to use stuff I already had during the experimentation process), I redid the stencil over the blob. To my surprise, I loved the halo effect the blob gave the pattern, but really hated the colors. Now I'm thinking of ways to purposely create the blob/halo before I put down the actual stencil design, using much nicer colors.
As for the final pink and white design...it got completely covered with a design that tied in better with the colors and design of the section of pet food logo that ended up on the top right of the shirt (I'm using old work T-shirts of my husband's, and most have pet food logos on them somewhere).
Even though the experiment with the watered down color failed completely, it actually gave me a new idea to play around with, so in the end, it wasn't really a failure, is was a mistake that led to new ideas. So, go ahead, make mistakes, and you, too, might create a big icky pink blob that leads to new ideas.
