Tech Thursday - Freezer Paper revisited

Originally posted on the Ideas and Inspirations blog, decided to re-post here.

The other month, we had Brandon from our Enchanted Lake BFC on the show explaining how to do freezer paper stencilling. For those of you who missed it, that's today's technique!

First you need to find a design, I decided to just draw mine. You can use coloring books or even your Cricut or eclips machine to find designs!

Next, you need the freezer paper. Place a sheet of freezer paper over your design, shiny side down and trace.

Think about what part of the designs you want painted. This will help you decide where you need to cut out.

You need to cut where you want the paint to go. Cut your traced design out. A swivel blade craft knife is great for doing this, especially if you have curves.

After I cut everything out, I always turn it over to the other side and inspect the cut edges. I want to make sure that the edges are nice and clean with no little paper "hangnails" on it.

For my design, I also needed to cut out the eyes, nose and mouth to keep those areas unpainted during the first layer of paint.

Place the cut-out freezer paper on your shirt and place the smaller pieces back in place.

Iron the freezer paper to the shirt. Make sure all the edges are ironed down and are sticking to the shirt, otherwise paint may seep under the design and your stencil design will not come out clean.

Place a plastic covered cardboard inside the shirt before painting to protect the other side of the shirt just in case the paint goes through.

As Brandon mentioned on the show, you can use regular acrylic paint mixed with textile medium to paint on your shirt. This gives you a whole array of colors to work with! I decide to try out the new So Soft fabric paints. They are perfect for this type of project.

I just used a foam brush to paint the large areas of the design in. Along the edges, my paint strokes go from the edge inwards, so that I don't push up the edges and get paint under the design.

Let the paint dry. Then, carefully lift off the freezer paper, revealing your painted design.

I removed the eyes, nose and mouth pieces so that I could paint these areas with the black paint.

For this, I use a liner brush and a what I call my bottle cap painting. I shake the bottle of paint to get some paint in the cap area. Unscrew the cap, and just dip my brush tip into the cap of paint. Lastly, I wrote in my words using the liner brush.

I made this shirt for Saturday's Crafting Carnival at the Mapunapuna Ben Franklin Crafts this past Saturday. We had a great time doing all kinds of make and take projects and people were winning awesome door prizes!

It was a fun weekend! Thanks for stopping by today and check back later for my Monday Makeover project!