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Costume Project: Wisteria Fox Day 4.5

 The extra yard of fabric is on the way! It's coming via USPS so might be a while so in the meantime I'm assessing what I have for other parts of the project. 

Paint and Fabric Paint

One of the major things I am doing for this project is hand painting wisteria vines throughout the kimono. I will also include blue flames (foxfire) as part of the sleeves and lower edges. 

Checking my box of paints I was happy to find that I had paint meant for fabric in a shade of purple! Miraculous! Who put that there? I also have acrylic paints in red, blue, and white so I can mix different shades of purple and pink. I also had a couple shades of green. I also found my Liquitex Fabric Medium so I can use all my acrylic paints. (Except the metallic ones apparently.  Luckily, not planning on using metallic paints. I don't think.)

For the blue flames, I was thinking of painting it on too and luckily I found my Turquoise Fabric Spray paint that I used for Princess Zelda's apron.  

I do like the slightly cloudy effect for the flame motif. I don't want them to be too prominent. 

Fabric Painting Methods


The plan is for the flame motif to create a stenciled effect out of painter's tape, cardstock, and wrapping paper. These will go along the bottom edges of the robe and sleeves. For the sleeves, I can get away with using my painter's tent to spray the paint on. The robe is not likely going to fit in the tent so I may have to use my old shower curtain and set it up on the railing of my porch outside. That will be weather-dependent. 

I learned from the Zelda apron that laying the fabric on the ground and spraying from above results in paint drop spots. So I need to be able to hang these pieces vertically. Or at least at a 45-degree angle. 

For the wisteria vines, I may create a couple templates, use some transfer tracing paper, plot down where I want the major flower clumps to be, and plan out the flow. There will likely also be some free-handing to this as well. 

Order of Operations

When I do each paint job will need to happen at specific junctures of construction. Making this a little complicated. 
  1. Cut out all fabric pieces. 
  2. Dye Fabric purple - darker at the bottom and fading up to white. 
  3. Sew the outer robe. This will give me armholes to hang with. 
  4. Spray Paint blue flames
  5. Paint parts of the fox applique (nose, eyes)
  6. Iron on the fox applique to the front of both outer sleeves. (Labeling pattern pieces will be very key to this.)
  7. Sew edges of applique if necessary. 
  8. Pin Sleeves to kimono body. 
  9. Start painting flowers. 
  10. Sew the lining and attach the sleeves to the kimono. 
So there's no actual progress today except finding my hidden supplies and thinking about this stuff. 
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