Fancy Pants

I love fun underwear. All my favorite panties are in colorful prints. Alas, fun prints aren't always easy to come by (or so my mother, who gives me underwear every year for Christmas, claims). The solution? Print your own!

The following how-to uses an onion to turn plain white panties into multi-color concentric-circle panties. It's a somewhat quirky take on a project I recently saw on the CraftStylish blog.

Materials

• White cotton panties
• Onion
• Knife and cutting board
• Fabric paint
• Paint brush
• Cardboard
• Aluminum foil or other impermeable surface to use as a paint palette
• Depending on the kind of fabric paint you use, an iron and press cloth

Steps

Slice off one end of a firm, nicely shaped onion. For ease of handling, I used the top end, which has a little tip you can hold on to.

Pour a little bit of each of the colors of fabric paint you want to use onto a piece of aluminum foil or other impermeable surface (perhaps an old ceramic plate).

Slip the cardboard in-between the front and back of the panties to prevent paint bleeding through to the other side. You might want to pull the fabric tight and fasten it to the cardboard  with a couple of binder clips. 

Brush the fabric paint onto the onion and press the onion onto the panties. I started with a few black prints followed by prints in red, blue and yellow. I used the same piece of onion for all of them because I liked the effect of the residual black paint outlining the structure of the onion and the other colors blending together. I also liked all of the impressions being the same size. You can, of course, choose to retain the the integrity of each individual color by using separate onion slices for each. 

Follow the directions on your paint to set the color in the fabric. Ta-da! Fancy pants!

A couple of tips: My blue, red and yellow paints were on the thin side due to the fact that I had to reconstitute them once after many years of disuse. This seemed to work well to create impressions that weren't too dense. To create similar quality prints with my black paint, which was of a more typical, thicker consistency, I first stamped the onion onto a piece of paper before stamping it on the fabric.

Until next time --

Enjoy!

Linda

Purty Bird