Rainy Day

 It is kind of a rainy, dreary day here and the kind of a day where you just want to stay inside and do something comforting. A lot of times, for me, that means crafting and, since I started that witch pillow when the girls were here, I thought I might as well see about finishing it today.

So this is where it was last time we spoke. Once I got this far, I realized that my inspiration photo was probably a lot smaller-more like just a decorative pillow than an actual functional one. I considered just "calling" it but for whatever reason, here I am still moving forward. Lol

There is a lot of dead space here and, as I said last time, the embellishments on the inspiration were not anything that I wanted to use so I started playing around and here is where I am at the moment.

I started by ripping a small piece of muslin and making the tag. If I end up using the tag it will get distressed around the edges and maybe put on with a rusty safety pin. I used an old set of stamps and permanent ink to do this.

The "3" and "1" are stamps but I am thinking I will do them-if I use them-with paint instead of ink...we shall see. And then the other side was so unbalanced so I decided to go with the bats. I had originally thought about cutting them from fabric of some kind and sewing them on-maybe even leaving a bit of their wings free to "flap" but, I think I am now leaning towards painting them as well. And, because I ended up really liking the stripes I painted on the jack-o-lantern pillow, I considered more of those here as well.

 Decisions! Decisions! Not my forte so I think I am going to go grab some lunch and then I will be back at it. Lol

OK. I decided to stamp the numbers and I love the way they turned out.

 I wish I had been able to do the same with the bats. I actually considered cutting a bat stamp out of a sponge but I only have the cellulous sponges with all of the holes and that isn't what I wanted so I went ahead and traced my shapes and started to paint them in. As expected, the paint is too thick to flow nicely on the nubby drop cloth so I watered it down some and it was doing fine...until it wasn't. It was now so watered down that it started bleeding. I ended up doing what usually happens next-making your shape bigger and bigger to cover the "bleed"-which also distorts your shape. In the end, the large bat is much larger than wanted and definitely more close to the hat than I would have liked but.... and, me being me, the bleed that you could still see was driving me crazy so I took some tan paint and tried to cover it a bit. It was one of those "if you give a mouse a cookie" kind of moments! Lol

I will say as I look at this closely I realize that the blurry edges around the bats where I tried to cover the bleed look similar to the frayed edges around the hat so I guess I lucked out. It isn't bothering me as much as I thought it would. Lol

Once I got here, it was later in the day and I had things to do and places to go-lol-so I left it at that but the imbalance bothered me. If I had sewn on the bats, I would have moved them but, since they are painted, my options were few. And so I left it for a bit and when I came back I played around with this.

Honestly, if I loved this pillow a little more than I do I might have kept playing but I was ready to be done so, out came the paint again and here is where I have landed.

So that is it for what has turned out to be a very LONG day. Something happened to my phone between last night and this morning and pictures that always transferred as jpeg were now HEIC-don't even ask. I now know way more about this stuff than I ever hoped. Thanks to my sweet granddaughter #3, who has been on the phone with me for hours and walked me through everything she could think of until she thought of this and VOILA! Still don't know what happened but I am finally back up and running and we shall see.

Off to take my furry friend out and then sit down, put my feet up, pour a glass of wine and call it a day! Stay safe and stay tuned.