Hand Calligraphy with Stencil on Fabric

I wanted to practice hand calligraphy mixed with my own stencil in the same piece.

I started painting a cotton fabric with acrylic paint. I used the small bottles of acrylic paint that you can find in hobby shops. When you use this kind of paint on fabric it can leave a thick layer, making it difficult to sew so you must be careful to put just enough paint.

Next, I drew the word *florero* and painted it with FW acrylic purple ink. When it dried, I took out the stencil I designed and cut and colored with paintsticks.

I hung the small panel and noticed that the word was competing with the vase and flowers. That was not what I was looking for so took the ink out again and painted on top of the letters, but this time with a lighter color.

The edited piece looked like this:

I sandwiched it with batting and a backing fabric. I loaded the sewing machine with Aurifil 12 weight and sewed around the vase, flowers and the word.

Because I love to combine different kind of threads in the same piece, I then changed to a thinner Invisaline thread and stitched the whole background with an easy quilting design.

For the finishing touches I added french knots around each flower.