Here you go, part 1 to get you started adding color to Venise lace.  Learn how to take something that's pretty but plain and make it prettier and colorful!  The second video follows just a bit down this page.

S U P P L I E S
Venise lace yardage and appliqués can be seen here.  Cotton doilies are here.  Go here for Ranger's Color Wash and here to see all of the colors of Dye-na-Flow.  An exciter pack of Dye-na-Flow is a good way to get an assortment of colors without spending a bundle of money. 

You'll need a palette and some brushes too.  The round, well style palette I used can be seen here.  I used a  couple of different sizes of round brushes, a liner, and a spotter.  See the #4 round brush here, the #8 round brush here, the size 0 liner here, and the 5/0 spotter for really fine detail work here.

And here's the second part.  As you get part way through you'll notice what I expected would be an outtake, but that Jess decided should be part of the video.  I'm the face you see, but Jess is the person who sets me up for the opening and then edits the video once we're finished shooting the how-to parts.  What she included is a short segment where the appliqué did not turn out quite the way I wanted.  My perfectionist nature wanted to omit it, but it makes sense to include it.  Not everything I create is fabulous.  Not by a long stretch!  You all usually just see the parts that are good enough to share.... not so today!

Samples of the lace yardage and appliqués I painted with several by Jess.  These are either 100% rayon (the lace and appliqués) or 100% cotton (the doilies).




Flowers and leaves.  Most were done using lace that was wet before color was added.




Cotton doilies take the color well too!

It's possible to get quite detailed about where to add color.

And you can get very creative with lace yardage too.  The top two samples have color that was randomly applied while the bottom two were painted using the paint-by-number technique.

The top two length of lace are the ones I painted in the video.  The middle one was one I tried where the paint had been thinned considerably with water.  I'm a pastel kind of girl, preferring those colors to more vibrant ones.

These pieces are not part of the video.  All were done a couple of days after we shot the footage, but turned out so well that I had to share them.  The butterflies and the brown-edged frame were all painted while the lace was dry while the green/turquoise piece was wet when the paint was applied.

This is the first one I painted and the appliqué was dry to begin with..  My original intention was to try and highlight some of the detail in the frame, but my overachieving, perfectionist nature took over and the next thing I knew an hour had gone by.  If you look closely you'll see that there was some color that bled to an adjacent part of the design.  It's close to impossible to avoid that unless you use a very tiny brush (very tiny!) and add color a tiny bit at a time.  I don't mind the overlap since it's minimal.

This frame took a lot less time since all I did was smoosh color over it after it was wet.  This reminds me of a Monet painting and I love the look.

After I painted the first frame there was color left over (better to mix too much rather than too little since it's difficult to recreate colors exactly) and so I decided to use them on a butterfly.

This too was painted with colors leftover from the darker frame and the watercolor one.  I like this one very much!