How To Create Peace... a graphic story

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I spent last week designing an elaborate graphic of a butterfly and scrolls to demonstrate my next process. But after this weeks events this just seemed...well, silly. I can only stand on the outside looking in. I cannot for a moment understand the struggles of African Americans, nor can I understand the complexity and stress of being a police officer. I feel so deeply for both as a mother and as a human. The thought of having peace amongst ourselves would be an amazing, yet sometimes idealistic view on life.

The peace sign was originally designed by the artist and graphic designer Gerald Holtom in 1958 for the British Nuclear Disarmament. The symbol showed the semaphore for the letters N (both flags held down and angled out from the body) and D (one flag pointing up, the other pointing down), standing for Nuclear Disarmament. However years later Gerald would make this statement about the design “I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it. It was ridiculous at first and such a puny thing.”

This simple yet powerful symbol of a circle and three lines was adopted into the 1960's American culture that represented peace and anti war and transcends through the decades, still being relevant today.

I thought how beautiful it would look on a textile. For this example I used a pillow case using the Peace stencil I created to decorate a Pillow for my livingroom.

How to create a stencil for your pillow

1. Create or buy your design that you will use on the Cameo Silhouette machine. You can buy this Peace sign stencil here from my Etsy store

2. Size the art, and cut our stencil

3. Decide on your color palette, I use Liquitex acrylic paint. I used a cool color palette to go with my livingroom colorpalette. I used only three colors, green, blue & white.

4. on a plastic container cover I squeeze out the desired colors & used white to help blend my colors.

5. Peal adhesive and place on Pillow case.

6. Stipple in paint with desired affect.

7. Peel stencil off, use a tweezer for smaller stencil pieces.

8. Once paint is dry I used an iron to set the paint into the fabric.

9. Add any specialty applications (My example has a zig zag embroidery stitch to add a dimensional accents.I love this ombre embroidery thread floss by Prism. and needles with a big eye for the thread.

10. Use a Pillow insert use an insert 2" bigger then your case and place in your room!

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Below are the products that I used in making my pillow.

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