I'd dyed my 6 yards of knit fabric, check! Practiced using my airbrush on a piece of quilting cotton, check! Bought some fabric medium and acrylic paint in a nice light blue, check!
So....did it work? No!
Two issues - 1: acrylic paint + fabric medium did not seem to go up through my airbrush - it'd just clog. A little water helped and would give me a nice spray on a white rag. So I went over my whole stencil, feeling good about fixing that initial problem.
2: After that - there was no visible paint on the fabric. The stencil plastic was light blue, the fabric looked unchanged. Hmmm.
I moved away from the airbrush (okay, after trying for another hour with different combinations of more acrylic, more medium, and even the addition of sparkly fabric paint), and got my girls to help me just daub the fabric with sponges with a bunch of combinations to see what was going on. I learned the following:
1: knit fabric takes up dye very differently than woven quilting cotton. Duh.
2: Although my acrylic paint looked like a much lighter tone than my fabric, it was pretty close. The paint is on there, but it doesn't show up on the dark fabric. At all.
3: What DOES show up is the expensive fabric-specific paint that I bought during my big gold polka-dotted tablecloth project this fall. And the kit came with blue, silver and an opaque extender (which, I tried, still doesn't make the plain blue acrylic show up).
So - I mixed all three bottles of those things together and am hoping that will be enough for my project. I cut out collar pieces today from my test area so that I'd have something to work on at the pool this morning, sort of a swatch, if you will.
I'm embarrassed that I didn't think more in advance about how much harder it would be to stencil a light color on top of a darker one. But I don't mind the result. I hadn't wanted sparkle, but why not go for it? Perhaps this will spur me on to do some beading along with it, which I have wanted to do but have been a bit nervous about jumping into.
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