Design on a Nickel—Finishing the pillows

Aft the pillow tops dried over night, a group of seamstresses came in to teach them to use a sewing machine, turn and stuff the pillows. I had in mind that they would hand stitch the opening closes, but they quickly overruled me and stitched them closed
Here’s one of the boys using my grandmother’s featherweight







After washing old pillows in hot water, we harvested the filling to stuff the new ones.

TA DA!

Just in case you were wondering about the durability of house paint on fabric, the striped pillow in the photo above was painted on canvas prepared with washing and drying. I did not use any fabric medium, and after a few days, I washed it in the machine in hot water and dried it in the dryer. No appreciable difference in color, and the paint is supple. Amazing.

The final delivery of furniture comes this week, more pictures to come.

Design on a Nickel—Painting pillows

To prepare the fabric for painting, I purchased natural canvas fabric at JoAnn’s. It’s with the canvas duck, but it does not have the same finish as the colored duck.  washed it in hot water with detergent and damp dried it in the dryer, then finished drying it on a clothes rack. After ironing it I cut the fabric in 14” squares and 18” squares.
To introduce the painting to the participants, I had them work on 5” squares using freezer paper, masking tape and rubber stamps. We used the latex house paint left over from painting the room and furniture. They very quickly got the hang of it.




Here are some of their artwork. We let them dry over night

Design on a Nickel—Scraping and Painting

The young people’s event at church this past weekend was a big success. One of them is an aspiring chef and we started out with a wonderful dinner prepared by Chris and his sou chef TaShai. Yum!
Then they got busy scraping the peeling UV film off the windows, and painting some of the wood furniture.





The coffee table for the room started out like this, a plywood topped activity table.


The legs were cut off so it’s 17” high, and it was sanded and painted. Later on, some decorative painting techniques will be applied.

After dinner we moved on to painting canvas to make pillows.