Stenciling Garden Cushions

I’ve been looking for some garden cushions for a while, but struggled to find any that did not cost the earth and I liked.

I’d finally decided that to get some I liked on my budget I would probably have to make them, although this too could be costly by the time I had brought foam pads and fabric as I have 6 chairs and also the benches I had built.

I popped to Homebase to grab some nails for my trellis and they had duck egg blue cushions in the sale two for £5. I called my sister as they had 3 packs enough for the chairs to see if she thought we could make these more personalised. Whilst on the phone I found 3 more packs and decided that would be enough to have them on the benches as well, only trouble was as I’d just popped in for nails I only had change on me and not my handbag (could have been a disaster) so I asked at customer services and they agreed to hold them until I’d run home and got my bank card (phew).

After a lot of research, and much to my sisters dismay, I decided the pattern I wanted stencilled on to the cushions is a lovely (complicated) rose.

Luckily my sister is very skilled on the computer and took the rose design and separated the colours and created one stincil per colour (6 stencils in total) we then printed these and stuck them onto old card folder dividers to make the paper stiffer and then started the very long task of cutting out the tiny pieces.

 

Once these were all cut out we couldn’t wait to try it to make sure it didn’t just all come out like a big blob!

Success:

Now I just need to work out how we get this on to the cushions and after some research I found that if you mix a fabric medium into acrylic paint it stops it flaking and cracking, so I found Liquitex Acrylic Fabric Medium (£6) and a big pot of Daler Rowney System 3 White Acylic (£8) on Amazon and eagerly awaited its delivery. I had some coloured acrylics in the cupboard for mixing colours.

Once the fabric medium and a big pot of white acrylic arrived we cut a triangle in each corner of the stencil and using masking tape marked these corners so we could line each stencil on top of each other correctly.

We started with the pale pink, applying the paint with a stiff paintbrush, ensuring it wasn’t too thick and being careful to hold the stencil still. I used a hairdryer to dry the stencil between each rose so we did not smudge or add extra paint where it was unwanted. We the repeated these steps with each colour:

Then the pale green :

white:

medium pink:

dark green:

(oops forgot to take a photo)

then finally the dark pink:

The stencilling took some time as I had to ensure each layer of paint was fully dry before adding the rest but I think you will agree they look fantastic and cost a fraction of the price (£3.75 each) than if I had brought them in a similar design.