Now, you got me started.....and my birthday boy !

A few weeks ago, Lori Brechlin of Notforgotten Farm posted her wonderful new fabric designs through Spoonflower... Here are her wonderful fabrics Well, guess I got pretty excited over this...I drew up a familiar design and uploaded it to see what it would look like. Here it is. I entered it into the weekly contest which this week happened to be "Hand Drawn" (instead of digitized) I am realistic enough to know I'm probably going to just get a few views. My "style" isn't really popular on this site, which is filled with thousands of beautiful artful designs, that seem mostly to lean towards vintage and contemporary....and the ones that aren't are way more artistic than mine ! Anyways, Lori has her one designs entered in the weekly contest also so if you have a chance go vote...I LOVE hers...and remember, I'm not playing the martyr here, I just did this for the heck of it, not expecting any votes or anything... But, Lori did email me after a comment I had left on her blog about her fabrics and she encouraged me to go for it,and offered answers to questions, or help..I did ask how she got that soft look to her designs and she told me she uses water colors or pigma pens , whatever tickles her fancy....lol.. Well, I had to give it another try. I usually do all of my doodles as sketches in pencil first then I trace with fine point micron pens and then scan and color in using an ancient program that came with one of my first scanners I ever owned. It's familiar for me, but not very " high tech " or involved and I can never really acheive the look I want, and the design I did up for the fisrt fabric pic I uploaded just didn't have the look I wanted . I did get some watercolors and a really neat sketch book made from all handmade paper...I love the look and feel of the paper !

So, I got my paper, my sketchbook and my paints out and started doodling. I did up a few colonial or fraktur looking flowers and played around with the water colors.I didn't buy a good set and not much selection for colors, so I tried playing around with mixing and still couldn't quite get the colors I liked.( you can even see I HATED the color of one flower so much, I actually CUT IT OUT and tossed it !)

I like most of the shades of the craft paints I have so why couldn't I just try those with alot of the paint extender mixed in to water down ?? so I re-drew a few of the flowers and used the watered down craft paints to color in. I loved it !! I used a wash over the whole thing to age the paper.In real life it looks like an old stained piece of antique wallpaper... So here is the end result of that:

Here it is scanned and shaded a little more :

And HERE is what it looks like in a repeat pattern for the fabric... I used the color combo I really love in fabrics that I see in alot of primitive /early style doll dresses. so, I'm thinking that I am going to play around with some more designs and see what else I can come up with.... ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Today is my little man's ( youngest Grandson, Keegan Rory Michael Heise ) 1st Birthday. We celebrated on Saturday with a fun picnic party at the Zoo Picnic Area...all the Grandkids had fun and the best thing was seeing Keegan with his First Birthday "Smash" Cake...Too cute !!

Have a nice rest of the evening everyone ! Robin