Screen printing the easy way.

I really like these two gear shapes and I use them in some of my quilts.

 I am thinking of using them as my "vocabulary" to explore surface treatments, using them either as a stencil to paint through, or as a stencil to mark shapes on a quilt.

I have a screen printing kit from Stencil Pro. It makes pink stencils, with no chemicals. You print out the image for your stencil on transparency paper, lay it on top of the stencil paper, put it in the sun, count to 25, take it inside and soak it in water. That's your stencil. Pretty much.

If you have a thermofax, that's quicker. I had to wait until it was sunny, and had to count to 25, which took concentration, as my neighbor came home. Had to wave at him. A car was parking on the other side of the street with blinky lights on it's hood, had to stare at the car for a bit in case the inhabitants were up to shenanigans.  I still have no clue who they were. We live on a cul-de-sac in a suburb of Chicago, so normally people who park on your street and leave their hazard lights on are not strangers.

Here are the four stencils I ended up with. There was a learning curve, I wasted another four. and if I do these over, I won't have the boxes around the gear, just have the gear.

I'm going to pounce them with chalk to be a quilting guide. And put some fabric paint and paint through them, like a stencil. And I'm going to get my BERNINA to embroider them. And my cutting machines to cut them out. Maybe.

Anyway, the amazing thing to me, is that this kit from Circuit Bridge was purchased in 2011, and the sheets are still just as active. It's me that wasn't using them....

Here's a link to my crafts class if you want to see one way to use stencils for quilting. In the class, I use a 1" square grid stencil I bought at a quilt show, to mark a quilting grid.

www.craftsy.com/ext/RobbiEklow_5176_H