Stencil It!

Stencil It - that's the current theme on the Artful Ideas ATC Flickr challenge site.  We had to include a stencil somewhere on our ATC and Deb who set the challenge gave loads of links and ideas.

This reminded me I had an electric stencil cutter pen bought many years ago.  I think I only ever used it once to make a stencil border to go around the bedroom wall - inspired by the likes of Linda Barker and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.  I used to love the daytime TV programme 'Change That' hosted by Mark Curry - the forerunner to the more popular and bigger budget 'Changing Rooms'.

Anyway, back to the stencil!  I drew a rough sketch outline based on this photo of Chloe - my 9 year old niece.  I hope she doesn't see this as she hates photographs of herself - perhaps she takes after me - I did crop myself out of this photo after all - LOL. 

Using the electric cutter I cut out a stencil trying to keep the eyes and mouth attached to the edge so they didn't fall out.  I lost one of the eyes I think, but it was still ok (just).  I pulled the middle out so had a negative and postive stencil as can be seen from the photo at the top of this post.

I had some ATCs already prepared with tissue paper and Brusho backgrounds so used a couple of those, and the others I sprayed Glimmer mist through onto text.

The one I like best is the one below where I dabbed black ink through the stencil onto an orange Brusho background, although the image is quite smudgy, I like the effect - and it was the best I could come up with!

I think this is a case of practice makes perfect as I found the whole stencil cutting process quite tricky and definitely not as easy as I thought it would be.  I've put the stencil cutter tool back in it's box - wonder when it'll come out again!!