Show and Tell with Michelle

 December 29, 2021

Stencils That Flip and Rotate, and So Much More!

Stencils are a very useful tool to keep handy for adding dimensional elements and general flair to handmade artwork. Today we are taking a closer look at our newest collection of stencils and will show you how some of them were intentionally designed to work in more than just one way!    Shop for your supplies here.

Our 12″ x 12″ Stencils

All of our stencils are made from reusable clear plastic stencil sheets cut in unique designs for use with a variety of media and art techniques. If you’re familiar with the Close To My Heart catalogs or website, you’ll recognize these grey image representations. Because these clear stencil sheets are hard to photograph, we will be using digital grey images to show you the stencil designs. The parts that are grey represent the plastic stencil film and the white parts are the cutout portions of the design, where your media would go through onto your project.

These nine designs you see here are each cut into 12″ x 12″ stencil sheets.

The first three stencils (Stencil Pack 1) are designed to fit smaller spaces and create borders.

The next three stencils (Stencil Pack 2) are for creating larger patterns and designs.

These last three (Stencil Pack 3) is what we want to look into a bit further today.

You can certainly use all three of these stencils to create the patterns as you see them, but they are capable of so much more with just a few simple tricks.

For starters, the flare on the left has so much potential! Look at how we used it in a scrapbook layout.

To achieve this multicolored flare, we laid the stencil on our papers and sponged color through it, as usual.

To add the second layer of flares, we flipped the stencil over and turned it! (Make sure you clean your stencil before flipping it over!)

You can add as many layers of different colored flares as you’d like (there’s a limit, but we haven’t done the math 🤓), just keep turning and flipping that stencil so that the lines fall in a different place every time.

Learn how to use the other two 12″ x 12″ stencils from this group, as well as a similar card front stencil, with our Creative Arts manager, Karen, in the video below!

Our Card Front Stencils

These stencils are also made from the same clear plastic stencil sheets as our larger stencils; however, they are sized to fit the front of a standard 4¼” x 5½” card. As you can see, all of these designs can be used as they are. That bottom row of designs (Card Front Stencil Pack 3) is extra special.

In the video, Karen shows us how to create a plaid background by flipping the horizontal stripe patterned stencil for a second set of diagonal stripes in a perpendicular direction. What you may not have known, is that the two remaining stencils can be stacked to create a combined, and more intricate, pattern!

All of these stencil designs are so versatile and can be used for a wide variety of projects. And, what we find is extra great about stencils—they can be reused repeatedly and rapidly to create new and unique cards and layouts, time and time again!