By order of the Queen, the inspiration for the event was Alcazar de Segovia, a castle in Spain. There are some very interesting wall paintings and tiles, but some of them would virtually vibrate if used in a Zoom call. The hubby and I really liked some small, red, interwoven designs that are found in some alcoves off the armor room (Velacio Viejo o Sala Ajimeces).
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The originals were clearly hand painted, with great little details. We didn't have a lot of time to pull this off and were going for an "inspired by" look instead of a strict re-creation. I drafted a simplified version of the first and third patterns that could be made into a repeatable stamp pattern. The base repeating block is 9" x 9" with the border being 18" long. We used thick craft foam sheets to make the stamps. Percy did most of the cutting using exacto knives and we glued them together with a hot glue gun.
We used regular matte house paint on cotton drop clothes from the local hardware store. The largest drop cloth is a little less than 9 ft x 12 ft, with a seam up the middle. This was our first attempt at any sort of block printing, so we took some time to do some test stamps before moving onto the large, final version.
Here are some close-ups of the different designs, plus a look at the almost final version. Yes, that is a car (our mini-van) behind the cloth in the final picture.
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This ended up being a joint effort with the hubby and myself. Our 6 year old also really got into it and spent at least an hour stamping on our test cloth. I estimate 2 hrs design time, 2 hrs making the stamps, and 4 hrs stamping (not including the test stamping). It was a little bit back-breaking, but easy to see progress, so, all in all, a good project.
We managed to find time to go back and fill in the corners of the border. Here are some pictures of it in use.
I'd still like to add the arched border across the top, but we have a workable decorated cloth for now.
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