Stenciling Workshop

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From the pages of Threads Magazine

Stenciling Workshop
Simple fabric painting offers unlimited possibilities for great garments

by Diane Ericson



	One or two well-placed stencils can create emphasis and focus rather than texture or pattern (pattern: The Sewing Workshop's Japanesque Top, 800-466-1599) .

If I had to pick a favorite embellishing technique from the many I love, I wouldn't hesitate. Stenciling would get my vote every time. It's both incredibly easy and totally open-ended: just cut any shape out of a thin sheet of plastic, then sponge fabric paint through the hole to print the shape onto your fabric or garment. There are so many variations to this simple formula that I can't imagine running out of new ways of using it to add detail to, help harmonize, or totally transform any sewing project, as I did with the garments shown here. Since I've already written an introductory stenciling article for Threads (No. 28, pp. 68-73, reprinted in Taunton Press's book Techniques for Casual Clothes, 1994), I'll just recap the basics so we can get right into the stenciling ideas I currently find most interesting.

Fabric paint, sponges, and a stencil or two



	Simple, quick, endlessly versatile, cleans up with water, and fits in a shoe box--what more could you ask from a fabric-printing process? Stenciling requires nothing more than a few sheets of inexpensive acetate for cutting stencils, fabric paints, and a few sponges.

The tools you need are almost completely summed up in the heading you've just read, and they're all easy to come by. You can see them in the photo at right. I mostly use any of three brands of water-soluble, iron-to-set fabric paints, Createx, Novacolor, and Versatex (see Stenciling resources), which are sold widely; applied thinly, they won't stiffen your fabric. The best sponges are made from dense foam (good sources are pillow forms or scraps from an upholstery shop) so the textures they make when printing are smooth. My favorite stencil material is a thin, clear sheet of inexpensive acetate, available from any art or drafting supplier; specify a thickness of .005 mm (clear report covers from an office supplier work well and are inexpensive). Thicker sheets interfere with the printing and thinner sheets curl up when dampened.

You'll also need an X-acto knife to cut the stencil, and something to cut on. I prefer a small, thick piece of glass with smoothed edges (from your local glass shop), but a cutting mat or even a stack of newspapers will do. Add a few plates on which to mix your paints, some water and paper towels, a fabric or garment to work on, and you're ready to design a stencil and start printing.

Designs to copy are everywhere
So, what will you print? First of all, there's no reason to design your own stencils (unless you want to), since there's so much excellent copyright-free material available for copying and tracing (see Stenciling resources). But surprisingly, it almost doesn't matter what shapes or images you choose to make stencils from, because it's so easy to get a wide range of interesting and surprising results from very basic shapes and by combining virtually any two or more stencils, using techniques I'll be showing you. So don't be too concerned about what images you start with. Just pick (or draw) a few simple black-and-white shapes that appeal to you and make photocopies of them.

The most important thing is that your images are shapes with distinct outlines that will translate well into holes you can cut out of your stencil plastic, because the holes in the stencil will be the positive, printed shapes in the design. The uncut part of the stencil material will be the background, or nonprinting portion, of the design.

The other key thing to remember is that you can't have any unconnected nonprinting areas floating inside other shapes (like the hole inside a donut), because nonprinting areas are actually the stencil material, which has to be all one piece, no matter how complex. Take a close look at each of the stencils shown here and you'll see what I mean. When you start printing, you'll discover that the shapes you leave between cut-out areas are just as interesting as the holes, so think about the design of these "bridges," or boundaries, between holes as you cut, too. Boundaries can be thick, thin, simple, or complex, and they usually look best if they're not all the same width.

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