Stenciled Pillow!

I'm so excited to share a new project with you as part of the Stencil Girl Blog Hop highlighting Jane LaFazio's gorgeous stencils! 

As you know, we moved back into our Texas house this summer. I am so GRATEFUL to be living in this house. We designed and built it eight years ago and I love the space and all that we share in it. We've re-arranged and purchased some new furniture, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to create something to make this space a bit more personal. We needed some new decorative pillows for our living room couch, so...

I started with Jane's "Vines" stencil and a piece of canvas.

For the first layer, I just wanted to get some overall color. So I used acrylic paint and a spouncer (seen on the right) to cover the entire cloth. 

You should be able to see here that I painted through the stencil... but I also flipped the stencil over and pressed it into the fabric to print off the excess paint. See the positive and negative images, here?

Next I wanted some strong blue bits of that lovely vine. This time I thought the dots might detract, so I just masked them with bits of masking tape. It's really easy to alter a stencil this way! Make it your own.

I added the vine all over the fabric, but stronger and more clear than the over green layer.

More layers! This time red. I have this squeeze tip that fits on the top of the Martha Stewart brand of craft store paint and I wondered if I could "trace" the stencil using that tip. It worked great.

I love the slightly blobby, dotted line created with this technique.

I'm getting a nice overall variety of imagery and color here, but I need something with a bit more punch. 

I decided to cut out one of the vines from the stencil so I could stamp a full image. It took some time to cut away all the tiny bits, but I really like this option for using the stencil. 

Again, I masked some of the stencil so my yellow paint wouldn't seep over into the area that I had not cut away.

To emphasize the shape, I added a sketch outline with a Micron Pigma pen.

Here are those punchy yellow vines!

Next I sketched the same vine shape on a bit of blue felt. It needed to be larger than the stencil, so I didn't use the stencil directly, but I eyeballed the design.

Here I've stitched down the felt vine and gathered other stuff to create the pillow. (Sorry the lighting was completely off in these two pictures. The actual color of the felt vine is more like the one below.)

Here's the finished pillow! Don't you love the green pom-pom fringe?! I chose all those colors to coordinate with the other pillow on the couch and I think they really work well together.

I didn't sew the felt vine all the way around the edges, I just stitched some thin veins in each leaf which allows them to curl up a bit. I love the subtle dimensional effect.

The StencilGirl stencils are have so much potential! I think I need more pillows! Check out all the other project and artists in the blog hop.

StencilGirl Products is giving away a prize on their blog StencilGirl Talk. ALL comments left on ALL the blogs are eligible to win. So leave me comment and why you're grateful for the place you live -- then leave comments on the other blogs too.

The giveaway will close on Monday, November 11, 2013 @ 11:59 PM Central Time.

StencilGirl Talk

Jane LaFazio

Mary Beth Shaw

Linda Kittmer

Jenny Lee Cochran

Kirsten Reed

Janet Joehlin

Corrine Gilman

Helen Shafer Garcia

Leslie Tucker Jenison

Ruth de Vos

Deborah Boschert

Julie Snidle

Mary C. Nasser