Tutorial - DIY stencil (easy)

This tutorial is for those of us who don't have Silhouettes or Cricuts. If you are one of those people don't even bother reading this. (and I'm jealous of you.) :D I'm going to show you how to make a stencil using (only) a transparency. Yeah. Suh-Weet! You can use this to make a sign like me, or use it for whatever. I'll show you what I do with mine whenever I get to using it. :P

First thing: Pull up Picnik. If you don't already have an account make one and I swear you will never regret it. :) Pull up any random pic and crop it so it's about 900 x 1200. I don't know if this step matters, but I do it anyways.
2: Grab a rectangle sticker and strech it so it covers your picture like so:




Make it white... mine's only green so you can see it. Next pull up text and type whatever you want. I like using impact because it's nice and bold. The less curves you have the easier the rest of the proscess will be. :)


Go to print your photo and select fill page (if you have a printer.... if you don't... sorry... you can't make this. :() and print. I always put my 'quality' on the lowest setting because this really doesn't matter; you're just going to throw it away.


Get your trasparency out and lay it on top of your paper and trace.

Put the transparency on a cutting board and cut out the letters with an X-acto knife. On the letters like O (with holes in the middle) leave a strip of plastic going from the 'hole' to the outside of the letter. Sorry, I am really bad at explaining things :)

This is the only pic I could get of the finished stencil because... it's sort of transparent... duh! :P Anyways, you can see the strip holding the middle of the O up in this picture. When you paint the stencil, just paint like normal and then come back later and fill the empty space in. :D Thank you for reading! I had had this whole post written, and I got on the computer today to see it was completely gone! WHAT?!!? NOOOOOOOOO! So I just re-wrote it. :( Still don't know what happened.

xoxo.

Alyssa