Good morning, everyone! Long time…no blogging! It’s been a full week since I’ve written a blog post, but feels like forever. I am on the mend and feeling much, much better…thanks to everyone for all the well wishes.
Now onto some business…our weekly tutorial 🙂 Last week, I talked about using your metal filigrees as tools to do some dry embossing. This week, I thought I would continue with that same thought process and ask…have you ever thought of stenciling using your filigrees? Well, today I thought I would share a brain dump of ideas for using your filigrees for just that!
Materials
- paper, canvas, wooden box, or whatever else you’d like to stencil 🙂
- metal filigrees
- ink pad w/ ink blending tool
- acrylic paint w/ sponge
- ink sprays
- texture paste w/ spatula
Stenciling w/ an Ink Pad
I thought I would start with the most forgiving medium for stenciling – ink. I prefer to use Tim Holtz’s Distress Ink because it blends so dang good. All you need to do is place your filigree on your paper and apply the ink in a circular motion using an ink blending tool.
Here is my finished stenciled corner using filigree #731-B:
Stenciling w/ Acrylic Paint
The concept of stenciling with acrylic paint is easy…apply paint to a sponge, and pounce it over your stencil. This being said, I find stenciling with acrylic paint very tricky…I always seem to get paint leaking in behind the stencil. I do have a few pointers to minimize this problem:
- Flatten your filigree in your die cutting machine before using it as a stencil. (For pointers, you can refer back to my tutorial on How to Cut and Bend Your Metal Filigrees.)
- Use the bare minimum amount of paint on your sponge, and apply the paint in thin layers.
Here’s a look my attempt to use acrylic paint for stenciling…not too bad, I must say. There’s only one spot where the paint creaped in under the filigree. I used filigree #671-B for this one 🙂
Stenciling w/ Ink Sprays
If using ink sprays, all you need to do is place your filigree onto your paper and just spray over it. I use tweezers to carefully remove the filigree because it will be covered in wet ink.
This method is great to use with filigrees that have fine detail, but it is also really important to flatten your filigree first. You can see from the shadowing in the picture below that my filigree isn’t quite flat…and the result is ink getting in behind the filigree 🙁
Here’s a look at the results using filigree #023-C…you can see that a fair bit of over-spray makes the image look blurry (nope…things don’t always work for me either 😉 )
Stenciling w/ Texture Paste
You already know how much I love adding a ton of texture to my projects, so I’m sure it’s no surprise that I am suggesting that you try using texture paste for stenciling. Simply place your filigree onto your surface, and use a spatula to apply the paste over the filigree just like you’re buttering a piece of bread 🙂
Here’s a look at the result (sorry…this filigree has been discontinued 🙁 ):
I encourage you to not only try stenciling using your filigrees, but push yourself to think outside the box a little and take the methods above to another level. For example, why not using the ink pad method, but using embossing ink instead? It creates a great watermark if left alone, you can use embossing powder to add some texture, or use mica powder to add a great shimmer to your project 🙂
Below, I combined last week’s tutorial with this week’s…I first dry embossed the filigree by placing the filigree faced down on my paper before running it through my die cutting machine. I then placed the filigree faced up over the embossed image and used distress ink to stencil. The result is pretty cool:
What other ideas do you have for stenciling with your filigrees? Leave me a comment and let me know 🙂
Thanks a bunch for popping by this week…I hope you liked the tutorial. Cheers and have a great weekend!
