Fabric Paint - To Do or Not To Do

Say it with me: Foe-toy-yah.  Now you
can be pretentious, too.  Cords in pic
will be dealt with once Santa arrives
with my flatscreen tv holder.

One project that I have been keeping on the back burner for a while is painting fabric.  I have read many tutorials that swear that it works, that it's soft, and you'd never be able to tell.  Well, I bought some fabric medium, and I have just the candidate for renewing: my fauteuil.  Wow, I'm sure you're thinking, you own a fauteuil?  What's that?  "Fauteuil" is "chair" in French, and one way to know if you're pretentious is if you can pronounce it, which, bien sûr, I can.  It is a rather subdued and somewhat sun-faded blue at the moment, but the fabric is in awesome shape and is obviously of some quality. 

Rather than ruin my beautiful chair, I thought I would first do a proof-of-concept with my daughter's rug.  This rug, a cotton striped kilim, had been exposed to more body fluids during my daughter's first four years of life than a toilet at a Poison concert.  Of course, we washed it, but certain things simply do not come out.  So, I tried painting it.  I could not perfect the formula of paint to medium, so that either the original stripes came through, or the rug was the texture of cement.  I had paid $25 for it (it was an 8x10), so it just went into the garbage.

Before and after cardboard chairs.



A shot of my poorly styled shelves,
with the turquoise painted magazine
holders on the left.  Fabric scraps
hanging from second shelf are
another half-finished project

The only other fabric I've tried to paint was my husband's old magazine holder, and that came out perfect.  But then, it was always hard and it was meant to be hard.  But, I had some extra paint, and I got some old chintz covered miniatures (they came with a Tomy bathroom that I had to have.  Tomy miniatures are the bomb, yo), that the glue had started to stain the already shabby looking upholstery.  So, I painted.  It seems to be fine.  I've been asking my miniature people if it feels like they're sitting on cardboard, but they sarcastically told me that they are sitting on cardboard, which is true.  Do I dare risk my fauteuil?