Hurray For the Red, White and Blue!

I have had daughter #2 here for the last few days and we had such a nice visit. We got to do lots of catching up, eating and running errands. Since I have been dog sitting, I have stayed pretty close to home but when there was nothing left in the frig at all except a few old baby carrots and condiments, it was time to hit the stores.

She was open to anything so, once we took care of the essentials, we hit some of the fun places. I haven't been in HL in so long that I missed the arrival of their autumn and Halloween goodies-not to mention the beginnings of Christmas!

I was hoping to find some fabric for my bar stools, but no luck there. I did pick up a pillow cover (on sale for 50% off so even better) so that I could do the 4th of July craft I have been dying to tackle!

This is all I needed and the cover was the only thing I had to buy.

I started by tracing stars on freezer paper and then cutting them out. At this point I wasn't sure how many I would actually be using. I used a pillow cover I saw at the "SippingIcedTea" Etsy shop as inspiration. There are still some available if you would like to just buy one but I love the crafting almost as much as having the finished product!

I decided to just go with three and I ironed the stars on to the cover. This gives you a really strong "paint bleed" barrier. I also put a layer of freezer paper inside so the paint didn't bleed through to the back.

I wasn't really sure how I was going to tackle this but decided to start with a block of blue...

...then I moved on to the red...

...and finished with white.

After that, I went back and played around with some blending and some additional blocks of color.

 

The last thing was to remove the stars and paint them white. I had hoped to find a white cover and then the white painting wouldn't have been necessary but I think this worked out better in the end because now the entire front of the pillow has a layer of paint. I did mix the craft paint with a fabric medium so the paint absorbed nicely into the fabric.

After all of the paint dried, I went back and embellished where I wanted bits of color.

And here's where it ended up. I really like it...it sort of reminds me of the canvases Hudson, Presley and I did last year.

Not bad for a project that only cost $2.50!! Seriously! This pillow cover has a zipper so I honestly couldn't have even made one as inexpensively!

More to come so stay tuned.