Butterfly Dresses

I just have to stay up a little later to tell you what I stayed up all night doing. Don't you sometimes wish you had clothes with fabric made using some of the great techniques we use to decorate paper? I find myself slightly tempted by the fabric dyes and paints, but how I do not need another medium to work in.  This project was motivated by that thought, however.

I drew a dress in Adobe Illustrator, and cut it out of acetate (laser printer transparencies) on my Silhouette cutter. I used removable adhesive to attach the acetate stencil to cardstock and with a make-up dauber, I pushed ink from various stamp pads from the stencil onto the paper, to shade the dress. The butterfly background is unmounted. I lay it face up on the table and inked a large enough portion to cover the dress. Then I put the card with the stencil face down on the background stamp and rubbed it with my fingers. Here are the results:

I photoshopped these only enough to make it look like they are all on one page, which they are not. It took about 40 dresses before I got the hang of it, but these last three were positively easy.