Hello everyone, Jenny here with you today to share my ideas for creating fabric pennants, perfect for decorating your garden at a Summer party. Fabrics are such forgiving surfaces to work on so it's actually easier than you might think to get great results!
The new collection of stamps and stencils from Raquel Burillo (Scrapcosy) are just perfect for this purpose, with beautiful floral images, lovely words and clever accent pieces.
Here's a peek at what's coming up...
The stamp sets used all come from the latest release and include ESC56, ESC57 and ESC58, combined with stencils PS528 and PS529. These are all available from your local stockists now.
The pastel palette of colours used for these pennants include PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Acrylic Paints (Cloud 9, Sand, Lemon Meringue, Guacamole, Spring, Cloudy, Mauve and Dolly Mix) which combine so well with Mattints (Acid, Fern, Bellflower and Foxglove).
To get started on these pennants you need to raid your fabric stash, ideally looking for non-patterned pieces in complimentary shades. I chose a neutral, vintage selection, dying some scraps with diluted Just Walnut and Lemoncello Infusions, though you may decide on a different colour scheme to suit your party theme.
Now grab those stencils and get to work, repeating patterns if needed to fill space. The fabric may absorb more paint than you are used to with paper so lift the corner of your stencils to check before you remove them completely.
I find ironing my fabrics before stencilling really helps to achieve that crisp finish. You can also re-iron them once the paint is fully dry. I know, ironing, but it's the fun sort!
Tear apart your stencilled fabrics into smaller pieces and begin to assemble them into rectangular pennants, adding in other scraps as required. A piece of muslin and a damaged lace tablecloth did the trick for me.
Make sure to overlap your pieces and I highly recommend temporarily attaching them together with a fabric glue pen.
A quick running stitch along the edges helps to make those joins secure and you can add extra translucent layers over the top to break up some of the larger areas.
I felt nervous about stamping directly onto the fabric pennants so decided to make use of PaperArtsy's Blank Printed Tissue (PT10) using grey permanent ink to transfer the images onto one side.
On the right side add a touch of shading with your Mattints.
The Acid Mattint with also add that pop of yellow when painted over Cloud 9 paint.
You end up with a much larger range of colours to play with by adding Mattints over your painted images and it's worth experimenting on a scrap of tissue if you are unsure about any of the combinations.
With coloured images at the ready it's time to add them to your fabric pennants.
Use a matte medium like PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Matte Glaze to stick your tissue images to the pennants. Be generous with your application because the fabric will absorb more than paper. And notice how the colour becomes slightly stronger with the glaze applied.
Your tissue images will take longer to become fixed in place so allow for drying time. The upside to this is that you have a small amount of 'wiggle room' to reposition your images needed.
The ticket image from set ESC56 is perfect for letting you add some lovely sentiments. I added some extra pieces of lace trim to the pennants and repeat stamped the Greek key motif from set ESC56 on grosgrain ribbon to join them together. You can disguise the joins with little flowers for a seamless look!
And with that these Summer Party Pennants are complete.
Let's give you a closer look at my finished examples;
You can divide your images up to extend across several pennants - I did this with one of the butterflies, some tickets and the mixed flower clusters.
I'm now thinking this could look good with a warm colour palette, possibly even more vibrant! Which colours would you choose?
Thank you for joining me today.
Jenny
