stenciling

I will be moving into my first rental house this coming semester. In making various preparations, I have begun making a small collection of tea towels in various colors and patterns. I knew I wanted sharp edges on the designs, and I also knew that a brush would not give me that sharpness. I decided to make stencils and use them instead. Here's how I did it.

I began by drawing the image I wanted stenciled on, in this case, a bumble bee.

After filling him in completely with sharpie, I cut away some of the paper around him and then covered the entire piece with packing tape.

Next came cutting him out with an exacto knife. I don't have a self-healing board, which would of course be ideal, but a newspaper folded over on itself worked just fine.

All that was left to do then was place the new stencil onto the fabric and apply a light amount of paint with a sponge applicator. I put the section of towel that I wanted him to be on in an embroidery hoop so as to keep the cloth even. I later did a design with this bee on a different towel and found the embroidery hoop to be unnecessary because of the thickness of the other towel.

After that it was only a matter of following the paint's instructions. And there you have it!