For my contribution to Skirt Week 2012, I made this little tutorial for turning an old, rather boring skirt into something a bit more interesting. Sometimes you don’t need to make a new skirt, but you need to liberate one from the back of your closet. I had planned on doing a tutorial for a button placket, but then I saw this picture and could not stop thinking about it:

These pants are from a shop in New York that specializes in super awesome Japanese children’s clothes. The idea is so simple and so effortlessly cool that I had to steal it.

painterly skirt tutorial

materials:

• 1 unloved skirt
• a bit of cardboard or freezer paper
• paint of your choice, fabric or acrylic or even house paint*
• stamps
• very small paint brush

directions:

1. The first thing I did was carve some starts out of an old eraser. If you’ve never done this before it may sound hard, but I assure you it is not. I carved two stamps from a big eraser and two from the tiny erasers on a pair of new pencils. It took me all of 10 minutes. There are many good tutorials for carving stamps from erasers out there (this one and this one for example). The stamp you make should be quite small, so stick to a simple shape–stars work well!

2. Put a piece of cardboard under where you will be stamping, or you can iron a bit of freezer paper to the back. You need something under your design, so the paint doesn’t bleed through to the other side.

3. Start stamping! You can be as fussy or as messy as you want. The look we are going for is paint wiped on the side of your skirt, so there aren’t too many rules you have to follow. It looks nice if the stamps are concentrated a bit in one area and then fade out towards the edges.

3. After you have stamped to your heart’s content, take a very small paintbrush and go over some of the stamps with more paint. This will make some of the stars stand out better and give the design a little more dimension.

4. Let the paint dry and go over it with an iron to set it.  Waalaa! a new skirt! One that will be loved and worn again!

*a note on paint: I don’t paint on my clothes very often, but when I do (like here and here) I like to use a product called fabric meduim. You mix the meduim with any acrylic paint and it makes it into a fabric paint. A good friend of mine turned me on to it. Another good friend told me to get out of the not-so-great craft acrylic paint aisle and go to the actually-an-artist acrylic paint aisle: the colors and the quality are better.

In college I had a brief fascination with Rorschach and fell in love with his earnestly scientific, but mostly artistic ink blots.  After I graduated, I took them down from my wall and promptly forgot about them.  Until I saw Martha’s gorgeous take on them in her beautiful line of homewares. I would have liked to pull out my prints and put them back on the wall but I seemed to have randomly dispersed my possessions all over the country after college, so instead I just made some shirts with my kids.

I used this tutorial on instructables for guidance, but did a few things differently:  I taped my shirt around the cardboard instead of tacking it on; he says to not press hard when you fold the shirt over, but I found I had to; and you can see that I fiddled with the image–adding more paint after I already printed it and then folding it again, which will make the image shift a bit, but I sort of like how that looks.  The ones the kids did are more crisp and clear because they just did it once and they were done.

This would be a great project just on paper and it’s  a fun what shapes do you see game–without all the psychological baggage of course.