first, thank you everybody for all the supernice comments on my last post and my engagement flickr picture and stuff! in case anyone else is curious, yes i probably will make my wedding dress, or at least recon a vintage dress in some way. it will be a crafty occasion i’m sure!

so, remember the shirt i was wearing in my sweatshirt skirt post? wanna know how to print it? i meant to show you awhile ago, because it’s a kid-friendly project so it would have been good for summertime, but now it can be for back-to-school clothes instead. first i’ll give a little background story…

back at the beginning of august i taught a freezer paper stencil class at the 100th monkey studio, and i taught the only way i’d ever done it – with x-acto knives to carve the stencils. there was a young girl in the class who’d never used one before, but wanted to try, so i taught her how, and she did a fantastic job! check it out:

but, i felt the need to give extra supervision for safety (it would have been horrible if she had cut herself!) and luckily it was a small class, so i could watch her most of the time. i was scheduled to teach the same project for the studio’s girls empowerment camp the following week though, and i knew i’d have to come up with some non x-acto options. i thought of the first method when i saw the studio’s huge assortment of paper punches! the woman working there tried out this idea at that first class, with the leaf print, and then i did more playing with punches with my circle skirt… (that tutorial was blogged on threadbanger)

but i didn’t want the empowered girls to be limited to the punch shapes, so i played around with scissors stencil cutting. and without further ado, here’s the tutorial!

cut (or rip) a piece of freezer paper (must be freezer paper – with wax on one side only) to cover the area you want to print on. draw one or more simple shapes that you’ll be able to cut out with scissors, on the paper side.

my design was inspired by lotta jansdotter, from her book lotta prints:

now cut out your shapes carefully, making minimal cuts to get to the shapes and between shapes. be sure not to accidentally cut out anything that shouldn’t be cut out (hope that makes sense).

now iron the stencil onto your fabric (wax side down, iron on high heat), starting with the center, carefully working your way out to the edges…

make sure you iron the cut parts down so they are touching, so you don’t end up with stenciled lines connecting the shapes.

now paint in the stencils by dabbing in up+down motions around the outlines. if you paint side-to-side you risk painting under the stencil and getting paint in the parts where the cut edges are touching.

once you’re done painting, you can pretty much peel off the stencil whenever you want – i usually wait 5-10 minutes; i know some people wait till it dries completely, but i’m way too impatient for that!

tah dah!

and proof that this is a projects kids can do! (with adult help with the iron, of course!)

those are by 3 of my girl’s empowerment camp students. the dog is based on her real-life dog, hence the insistence on black paint, and for the cats, they painted on faces after the paint dried. i think the girls all loved the project! so if anyone has kids with boring back-to-school clothes that need some personalizing, i hope this helps! or, if you’re an adult who has a hard time with an x-acto knife, this is a super easy no-knife method, and great for simple, lotta-esque designs!!