DIY Tutorial - Customised Jumper using Fabric Paints

If you follow me on twitter you may know that Chris and I are hunting for our first house at the moment. To help us in our quest I decided to make a lucky house hunting jumper! (Of course)

A little while ago the people at The Works gave me a voucher to spend in their store! Yippee! Among the crafty bits and bobs I chose was a set of fabric paints. This gave me the perfect excuse to put my crafty hat on and try my hand a DIYing my own jumper.

Supplies:

• A jumper
• Fabric Paint
• Some fabric transfers of your choice
• Pins
• An Iron

First up, pick out a cute design. Mine came out of 'The Bumper Book of Embroidery Transfers'. This is authentically vintage as it was my mums and it's got to date back to the early nineties at least! 

Pin your designs upside down to your jumper.  Try to avoid using the pretty pins with little coloured plastic bobbles on the top. I used these once and the iron will melt them very quickly onto your lovely jumper, and that probably isn't the kind of unique design you were going for.

So, once you have them pinned securely in place you want to carefully iron over each design. You can peel back the corner of the transfers to see how well they have taken, if they are missing areas or are not dark enough then just iron a little more! Once you are happy that the whole design has been transferred you can unpin them.  

Now get your fabric paints and start painting! You can see above how the transfer came out (the lighter areas of the design) and the areas I have started to paint. In the end I decided to just use the black paint, but i might add some pretty colours at a later date.

I found that the nib of the paint a little too large for the intricate designs of my pattern, so i resorted to using my nail tools to do the job, but they actually worked quite well! Although it made it a little more time consuming than i would have liked.

I think it turned out pretty good, what do you think? I'm not sure how the paint will wash yet, but it looks like it will hold up well. If my new lucky house jumper helps me to find a house like that one then I shall be very happy! Well, I can dream! Wish us luck!

Laura xXx

P.S As I am posting this Chris is putting in an offer on a house we went to see this morning, eep!