Painting Fabric

I've been fascinated by hand-dyed and hand-painted fabric for ages, but the last couple of weeks, I've been reading everything I could get my hands on. Sometimes that just makes it more confusing and you just have to try it for yourself. I had some prepared-for-dying fabric and a small sampler kit of fabric paints on hand, so I've experimented this weekend.

I started with dry fabric, and used foam brushes to apply slightly diluted textile paint randomly. It looks pretty sketchy at this point. I'm not sure if I need to dilute more, if the paints are too old, or if the foam brushes are just soaking up the paint and not transferring it to the fabric.

I added more paint, with more dilution, and also used some Dye-Na-Flow paint that is already more fluid. Still wasn't liking it.
I used some turquoise Dye-Na-Flow over all the white areas, and sprayed water on it to help it spread. Now it has a more unified appearance. The wad at the top is another fat quarter, scrunched up and dabbed with different paints.
This is the second piece. It also started with dry fabric, and I brushed blue and red in alternating stripes, then did cross stripes in yellow.
I mixed periwinkle and yellow in some proportion and got this yellow-green color. I started spraying the fabric to help the blending along. This looked rather putrid for a while, but as it blended for a while, and I added some olive metallic, it looked rather nice.
I did one more piece after this. The fabric has to dry for at least 24 hours, and then be heat-set with an iron. So I'll post more pictures then.