Playing with Stencils

IN the scrapbooking section of the local Joann's store, there are these laser-cut papers that looked like they would make cool stencils.  So I bought a few on sale and tried to figure out how to use them.  They're made of heavy paper, but I wanted to use them to stencil dye on fabric.



Well, Mr S came to the rescue.  In his own personal stash he had some stuff that he uses to coat the handles of tools with rubber so that they have non-slip grips.  Why not try it?


So after a test on some notebook paper, I sprayed it on my laser-cut paper and it worked!  It made my paper stencil usable with wet media.

Alternatively, I suppose I could have just used paint, but this was too cool to pass up.  Mr. S claims it comes in different colors, so I could have had something in other than basic black.

I had these boring hand-dyes, so I stenciled on some thickened dyes.  But the dye wasn't strong enough (it's been in my fridge for a while) and it's better, but still pretty boring.

I was too impatient to do more dyes.  So I got out my Setacolor paints and rolled on some fuchsia and purple.

And voila!  Much more interesting.

I had these boring bits from my deconstructed screen printing experiments.  So I made up a plate with cardboard and hot glue and used these colored pencil sticks to rub the design onto the fabric.

I really liked the circular feel of Nienke's Rosarium (here) And I tried to get the feel of it without copying her work.  --Still pretty boring.

So I took a cue from her and stenciled on flowers and leaves and sprayed them with water.  I'm not crazy about mine.  Maybe it needs some gold?  I think that the paint colors fight with the background color.  And the circular thing just isn't happening at all.

But for this side, I used a mixture of golden yellow and purple paint and just rolled it on over a stencil of leaves and I love this one.  The colors are much better together and I could see using this whole or cutting it up.