I've been working on all of these projects dealing with the house and creatively in general, and they seem like such large projects. There is the seat cushion I custom made for our kitchen built in bench. The cover for it. The cushions for the wall. The large 7 by 1 foot picture panorama of the valley, several other smaller paintings like the one of Phil and I. 

     Now milk painting. I have been researching it for a long time now and finally got all of the materials together for it. It is a slow process as I now have to add a second color over the first color. A tutorial is soon to follow. But I had to take a break from it, because the weather turned bad at the same time as the quark that was supposed to go into the mixing of the other color. So now I am waiting for Phil to come home with skim milk (I'm on spring break) so that I can begin the second and last part of the process. 

      I have decided to take a necessary break from delving too deeply into those larger projects, i.e. the large painting panorama that was going well, but is now lacking depth of field, to work on small whimsical and medium gratifying projects. Today I am working on the cushions for the back of the built in bench cushion. I had originally thought I would use buy a neat fabric for it, but messed up in the original design of the cushion, so now I have all of this leftover oatmeal canvas. What isn't going to be used for floor cloths, is going to the cushions. And I just got a new sewing machine, so I am excited!

I wanted to do a screen printed image. I was reminded of how beautiful Ikat (eye-kat) fabric  is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikat).  But since I don't have a loom and I don't have much cash to pay for Ikat fabric, I thought I could make it myself.

Luckily there are great resources for how to make an Ikat print. One such is located on the The Mustard Ceiling Blog. I finally settled on a SIMPLE image. And believe me it took awhile. I figured for the first time it would just be easier. Instead of coral, it is going to be brown to match the blue seat cushion and not overwhelm my already colorful kitchen.

The first step I have completed is to print this pattern from The Design Sponge. Rather than doing the image white, with the background colored, I am cutting out the white part to make the image brown. Gotcha? I have had to make some minor adjustments so the middle doesn't come out, but I think it will still look great. 

 From there on I followed the very clearly set out steps from The Mustard Ceiling Blog.

Photos to come.