Saturday, October 13, 2012

Freezer Paper Painting--Minion Pillow

Hello blog friends! We have been making quite a bit of progress putting together our minion nursery for our little guy. I'm 35 weeks pregnant, so it's about time to wrap things up. We hope to finish hanging some shelves and order a chair this week. Once those are in place, I will give you the grand tour, but for now I want to share a fun project the Mr. and I worked on yesterday. We made this pillow!

The technique is called freezer paper painting. I found a nice tutorial of it on this blog.  We finished our project, and Mr. Mayhem looked at me and said, "When do we put it in the freezer?" So I will take this opportunity to point out that you will not actually use the freezer, just freezer paper. ;-)

As you may or may not know there is no minion fabric in existence. Hence, the need to create my own. I started with plain white canvas/denim type fabric. I sewed a pillow case to fit my pillow form. I am probably the most amateur sewer on the planet, so I did not create a tutorial for that. I'm sure there are lots of good ones out there if you need it. 

We started with a minion image from the interweb. Mr. Mayhem worked his computer magic to simplify it into something we could cut out. Then we placed freezer paper over it and carefully cut around the design with a sharp razor blade knife. 


In case you don't know what freezer paper is. (Mr. Mayhem didn't) It is in the ziplock bag aisle at Wal-Mart. 
 

I didn't get any pictures of the cutting process, but this is what we were left with. It is important to remember that you want to remove the black part, not the white part. You are creating a stencil.


Once we had our images cut out we ironed them on to the pre-washed pillow cover that I had sewn.  Put some sort of fabric between the paper and the iron. We used an old pillow case. I would also like to stress here: DO NOT USE STEAM!!! It must be a dry iron or your paper will be wrinkly and not provide a good seal. We experienced this. Pictures to follow.


 Once the image is adhered to the fabric you are ready to paint. There are two options for paint. 1)Buy fabric paint. 2) (what I did) Use regular acrylic craft paint with some textile medium mixed in. Either way you will be able to wash your project with out the paint washing off. I used Anita's textile medium and paints.


You simply mix in 2 parts paint to 1 part medium. Easy. It does make the paint a little bit more runny than with out it, but we didn't have a problem.


Carefully paint inside the stencil. I painted this minion because it was ironed correctly and therefore easy to paint.


Mr. Mayhem painted this minion because it was the one that we had used steam on. You can see how wrinkly it was. He carefully painted to make sure no paint seeped under the stencil.


Good work, honey!


 After we finished painting yellow, we decided that we didn't like it. It was too close to the white, and we didn't think it would stand out enough. Luckily we hadn't removed the stencils yet, so we just painted over it with grey paint mixed with the textile medium.


When the paint was dry, we carefully peeled away the freezer paper. We were left with our cute design! 


 Here it is in the current nursery chair. We will hopefully be swapping it for a glider rocker this week or next.  I love how the pillow turned out. It is simple, but cute and special. It really coordinates with everything in the room and does a nice job bringing the theme to this corner.


To catch up on other nursery projects so far go here, here, and here.

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