Napkin Stamping

These were made as a wedding gift for some friends and I just finally finished and delivered them last week. They didn't turn out exactly as planned - stamping with textile paint on dark fabric is much, much harder than I had anticipated.

I made the napkins myself from a dark brown twill. I also carved the stamps - the ones you can see here are papyrus and lotus columns drawn from ancient Egyptian motifs. I also had adorable golden flies, but didn't get a photo.

For the green metallic paint I would up sponge-brushing the paint onto the stamp, which is why they're a bit blobby.

For the blue, which was not metallic, I cobbled together a stamp pad with some papertowels. This used quite a lot of paint and wasn't really saveable for future use, but worked resonably well.

Using a brayer didn't work at all. I'm not sure if that's because I have a cheap-ass brayer, if it wasn't suited to working with acrylic paint, or if I just suck.

For the golden flies (no photo) I sponge-brushed again.

I did discover that re-carving some lines helped with the blobbiness.

In the future I don't know that I'll do long, thin motifs, especially with long straight lines.
I will probably also stick to lighter colored fabrics in the immediate future as I've had much better results with them.

I also plan to get some screenprinting ink to experiment with to see if I can get a better result on a variety of colors.

The battery in our digital camera died, so unfortunately the only half-way decent picture we were able to get was with my phone. :P