Feathers of the Headdress Kind

I experimented with how to make the feather headdress for my Mayan mask.  My eyes crossed when I thought of cutting out all those little holes and I pondered, took the dog for a walk, looked through my art supplies and finally had a "Bingo" moment.  I cut the holes out after all, but in freezer paper rather than fabric.  Thank goodness for an interesting audiobook to reduce the tedium.  This gave me a stencil for each feather.

Rough-cut fabric and stencil

Then I ironed the freezer paper pattern/stencil onto the fabric.

Pattern/stencil ironed on to fabric

I painted the holes with a black Shiva Paintstik.  Since the feathers will be on a black background, and ultimately quilted down it will look like the black is showing through.  At least that is the idea.

Painting

I painted with a small, stiff stencil brush.  The only downside of Paintsticks is that they are oil paint.  They take 24 hours to dry and then you can heat set them.  Of course the brush needs to be cleaned up with mineral spirits or turpentine.  However, I love them and they did a great job for this project as the paint was easy to control and is not messy to paint with.

After the suggested 24 hour drying period elapsed, I went around the outer edges of the paper pattern with diluted Liquid Stitch (scroll down to last week's post), applied fusible to the back, and trimmed the edges down to about 1/16 inch.  The last step was to pull the stencil and fusible backing paper off and the feather was ready to apply to the background fabric.

Black "holes" on the feather.

Voila!  Just what I wanted... I think.  It does look a bit like a branch of leaves.  Oh well, it will give the effect that I want.

Sew some happy seams this week.  I wish you awesome results!