Houston, We Have Lift Off!

I'm off to Adelaide next week for the annual SCQuilters Retreat, so I guess it's time to start making the 70-odd signature squares that I'll be swapping. It seems that most of my fellow swappers are long finished, but where is the excitement in that? Nothing like a firm deadline and certain public humiliation to help focus the mind.

First step (after finding the fabric), is to stamp the signature part of each siggie. Tick.
The theme of the Retreat is Wine and Roses. I've already finished my table topper, called 'Whining about Roses', which I'll post once the Retreat has started. But, for the siggie squares, I thought some bunches of wine grapes would be fun.
And how did I make these grapes? Here are my tools:
I stirred the paint with the chopstick and poured some paint out into the styrofoam plate. It helps to get the foam brushes wet at the sink first and squeeze them out really well. That way, the paint doesn't soak up into the sponge, never to come out; the water got there first.

For the paint, I used Setacolor Transparent - Fuchsia and Rose Bengale. I used two different shades of red/pink to liven things up but I'm not sure that it made that much difference. Not enough contrast perhaps.

I bunched up the bubble wrap, dabbed some paint on the foam brush, dabbed the foam brush on the bubble wrap and dabbed the bubble wrap on the fabric.

Since I don't know where the strips will be cut into blocks, I just made it up as I went. The directions on the paint containers say to heat set with an iron for 5 minutes ... yeah, right. I'll toss the siggies into the dryer to heat set them after they're finished.

And the green is in anticipation of some leaves to be added later on. Maybe. And I've got some ink pads and a stamp with my name, suburb and email address on it somewhere ...

I'll post some photos of the finished products once, well, there are some to show.