Last SWAP item - Spray painted shirt

First, update: The coat is nearly done - it just needs buttonholes put in and buttons sewn on and it's completely finished. Yay! On the sad side, I lost two of my four green buttons so they're a no-go at the moment. Additionally, they were a little off from the green of the topstiching/buttonholes so I'm thinking black buttons after all. On the happy side I tested out my neato Geist/Singer buttonhole attachment and got the settings all tweaked to make the world's most gorgeous buttonholes. So tomorrow or the next day I'll whip those out. Happiness!

As for my very lastest item -

I realized I didn't have the time for the more elaborate silk top I wanted to make for my last SWAP item and, at the same time, realized I don't NEED an elaborate silk top. The items I'm wearing the most from my SWAP are all nice, pretty knit tops that I don't have to baby and can throw in a warm wash with all our other cottons. So went digging through my knit box and found a rather insane amount of white cotton/lycra knit. What was I thinking? White is NOT good too near my face. So began thinking and fiddling and thought - aha! - why not a white knit shirt with black screenprinting and a black collar? That should ensure it looks good on me and with the rest of the SWAP. However, I'm rather low on screenprinting materials. Like, none. What I did have is a bottle of black spray fabric paint and a small collection of stencils. I think I can do something with this.

I used a stencil originally intended for home dec painting or some such from Michaels and Tulip Cool Color Spray(c), also from Michaels. It's not the greatest fabric paint in the world and definitely has a bad tendency to squirt and drip rather than the nice airbrush spray it shows on the package, but it was significantly cheaper than the airbrush so it's not unexpected. And I rather liked the mottled look it gave. Rather faded and oddly designer-esque, if I may say so. We'll see how it looks when sewn up.

Since I wanted the stencil to be a little off the neckline I traced out the front so I could carefully position the stencil without worrying about the cut out piece stretching or moving like it always tries to do. Seriously, cut pattern pieces are slightly alive. After a bit of careful eyeballing and a lot of just throwing it in the right place and figuring it'll work I carefully covered up the rest of the top with DH's thesis rough draft (it was in the recycling bin) and sprayed until I was happy with the color. I liked it enough that I added another motif down at the bottom right hem. The whole thing took maybe 20 minutes and I like it, so far. I can see doing similar printing on other fabrics with other stencils - maybe a shadow of flowers or even an octopus. :) Fun results with low effort -works for me!

The paint needs to dry 24 hours so I can't finish the shirt until tomorrow. Good, since I'm still pounding out a paper and still have reading to get done. Sigh. The semester's nearly over, thank heavens! Now to just survive until then.