Stenciling class

My local SCA group has an arts night every first and third Thursday of the month. If someone knows something, they put together a class and share it. Otherwise, we sit around with our various projects and spend the time comparing notes and chatting. Tonight was one of the class nights. Lady Nastas'ia Volkovicha led us through the process of making stencils, and then using them to make matching t-shirts with the local group's 'war dragon' symbol on it.

First thing we did was to trace the war dragon onto poster board, and cut it out. I started out using a sharp pair of scissors.







I quickly found however, that an exacto knife worked much better for the detailed part of things.







We sprayed the back of the stencil with quilt basting spray, and stuck it down to our t-shirts. There is a piece of cardboard inside the shirt, so the paint doesn't bleed through to the back layer. Then, we used some cheap foam brushes and fabric paint, and pounced the paint on straight up and down.



Then back outside to spray glue the second part of the stencil. This is Nastas'ia, our fearless leader for the evening. She is spraying outside, so the glue fumes don't make the rest of us even sillier than we usually are.









We carefully placed the other part of the stencil over the (dried) red paint, and pounced in the white. This took a couple of coats, as the yellow kept bleeding through the white.






A handy hair dryer sped up the drying process.








After it was safe to touch, the stencil came off, and we used fabric paint straight out of the container to outline the pattern.











Finished shirt! Start to finish, less than three hours. The paint needs to sit for three days now, so it will cure and become washable.

This was really, really easy. My mind is spinning with possibilities...