Painting paisleys for Cersei

So after a long fruitless search I decided the closest I was going to get to the fabric for the side panels of Cersei's aqua bird gown from Game of Thrones would be to make it myself.  I bought some coppery/gold silk from Home Fabrics on sale for $5 a yard and decided I'd print the design on myself.  FYI - this is the original:


My original thought was to enlarge one of these designs to the correct scale then trace it and make a stencil.  But the design is complicated and there were no images where there weren't folds in the fabric.  So I looked around for a stamp or commercial stencil I could use.  I found many beautiful stamps from India that are actually used to make hand printed fabrics.  But while they were lovely and authentic none of them were large enough, and they were quite pricey besides!  Then I ran across this silkscreen stencil from Martha Stewart.  Not only is there a nice large paisley that comes close in size and intricacy to the Cersei gown one but there are some other nice designs that might be fun to do on some sheer cotton for a Regency gown one day.  I used a pouncing sponge brush and the same metallic paint I used on my American Duchess shoes in a metallic rust color.



It was a hot and sunny day so I took the whole project outside so things would dry more quickly.  I only managed to get two rows done but I'm very pleased with how it looks, while it's not exact it has the feel of the original to me and the colors are fairly similar.  






Comments

  1. That looks amazing--hat a clever way to do it!

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    1. Thanks! It's going to take a while but I'm liking it.

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  2. I might just have had to order that stencil from Amazon (no one here seems to stock it). Mine will be for historical costumes though; not GoT.

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    1. Yeah, that's part of what I liked about it, that there were designs that could be used for both my GoT costume and other costumes. The silkscreens are very delicate and you do need to wash and dry them after every use, which is a bit of a pain when making something with this many designs! But I think they're very nice designs, more traditional and not as stylized as many of the other paisley deisgns out there.

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  3. Thanks for sharing. Nice work.

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