Stencil Shirts with Freezer Paper

Step 2 Stencil

First: Find yourself a stencil. You can draw directly on the freezer paper (sticky side down of course), or use a stencil someone else made, or you can put an image into any photoshopish program and adjust the brightness/contast until you have something simple enough to cut out. You could do multiple layers with this, but I've never really gotten into that. In any case, the black parts are what you want to cut out. For this shirt I'm going to take a drawing from my sketchbook, blow it up on my computer, print it out on freezer paper, and then add some lettering and thicken up the lines before I cut.

One of the great things about freezer paper is that you don't have to worry about islands. Since you're ironing on the design, you can just place any white bits that aren't connected to the main part of the stencil. This is a good thing, as my stencil is sloppy and has a lot of islands. You can also iron on corrections if you mess up somewhere while cutting it. The downside to this is that most freezer paper stencils can only be used once, but if you're careful and don't use islands you may be able to peel it off intact, though it probably won't stick again.

Hokay, so: now, you either have your fancy smancy stencil drawn, or ready to print onto freezer paper. You can probably buy freezer paper at a market or maybe an art store or some place like that. I'll bet the Reynolds company makes it, I don't know what it's actually used for, there's a roll in my house and I stencil with it. Anyways, whatever you do, make sure your stencil is on the plain side of the paper, with the waxy side down. WAXY SIDE DOWN.

Comments

[spark master]

I like this instructable, but I are beez confuzed. you draw then scan then adjust, do you then slice a piece of freezer paper and print it on the paper side? then slice and dice it, reassemble it on the item and iron it on a shirt?  After a good drying you can peel off the paper (pulling off the plastic backed stencil) ?

This is a really nice instructable.

You can get same effect with masking tape on a piece of silicone paper (for small simple designs on a shirt pocket, or plastic contact paper if you have some that is due to be tossed out, it is too tooo expensive for this.

I stenciled numbers and simple stuff on on my kids Pinewood Derby cars with the blue masking tape method, came out nice.  The mask stencils allowed HIM , not me to do it and some came out a tad imperfect, but who cares! 

(Freezer paper has a plastic coating on one side to act as a vapor barrier and quick release, while frozen)

thanks

[Potaterchip]

great idea.

[grrrachel]

You can actually print your design directly onto freezer paper if you have an inkjet printer. There are several precautionary measures to be taken into consideration - EG: make sure the paper is flat and not curled, back the sticky side with plain printer paper to prevent the wax from harming your paper feeding mechanism. Common sense stuff. Covering the front (dry side) of your printed freezer paper with clear contact paper before cutting it out also makes the stencil a little more rigid and ready to be used multiple times. It's a little harder to cut out that way, but you do end up with a piece that can be used over and over- thus saving time redoing the cutting process.