*update: I'm re-posting my old blog posts here on our new platform here. Please note that the dates displayed of when this was posted aren't accurate. It's been a while since my last post, even though I had planned to write a post a week. Let's be honest here, I can be a bit disorganized (okay, a lot if you ask my husband). Though not with getting orders made and shipped out on time :). But anyone else who can relate with struggling when it comes to schedules and (healthy) routines? I certainly do. I get easily distracted, which is often a bad thing, but it can lead to new discoveries too. Sometimes that which distracts me leads me to try out new things, like stenciling for example. A year ago I had never tried to stencil anything - besides perhaps during some early childhood school crafts projects. Anyone remember these? I never tried my hand at screen printing or silk screening, let alone creating silk screen stencils myself. I've always loved doing crafts, but I never thought I could create something that looked professionally made. Once I discovered silk screens that all changed. Now I've been stenciling on an array of different types of surfaces, from fabric to glass, to plastic, to canvas, and so on. But to keep this post from getting too long, here are the latest 3 things I've been trying:
Stenciling on paper cards Let's start with cards. These are so fun and super easy to do. So much so that our 10-year old daughter may have become addicted to making them. She loves getting creative with them and taught me a new technique using crayons, which she otherwise never uses anymore, to create an ombre background. Ombre is the French word for "color that is shaded or graduated in tone" BTW. Here's an example of the technique she used. For the card in the picture, we used a store bought blank cards, painter's tape, school crayons, paper towels, one of our All Purpose Silkscreen Stencils, and water-based acrylic paint. Squeegee is optional. We used painter' tape to cover the edges of the card which we wanted to stay white, thus creating a border. Before applying the tape to your card, fuzz it first by sticking it to a towel or other high fiber fabric a few times. We did this by sticking it to our arms a few times first, which I would not recommend. The purpose of this is to make the tape a bit less sticky so it won't tear the paper later on when you take it off. Same goes for stenciling straight onto paper. i would recommend fuzzing the stencil before applying it to reduce the stickiness ever so slightly and avoid tearing the paper when taking it off - always use an All Surface type of stencil for paper! Making sure to position the card the way you want it with the bottom towards you and tape off the border. Using normal school crayons we choose 3 colors from dark to light to later fade into one another. Start by coloring the bottom third of your card with the darkest color crayon, lay it on thick. Then proceed with the medium color in the middle and finally, the lightest color for the top third. Go overboard with the coloring to really cover the paper, especially if you have somewhat textured paper cards. Now, scrunch up a piece of paper towel (kitchen towel) and rub it over the darkest layer first, taking off the excess crayon. You want the surface to be as smooth as possible. Start with the bottom and work your way up. When you move onto the next color make sure to use a clean part of your paper towel to avoid getting the darker color onto it. Always use a clean part of the paper towel to fade one color into the next, working your way up from the darker color into the lighter color. Once you've smoothed out your crayoned surface, double-check it by looking at it from an angle AND running your finger over the surface to check ti is completely smooth. Sometimes little lumps of crayon will get left behind and this will prevent your stencil from fully adhering to the surface and create bleeding (the paint goes underneath the stencil creating blotches you don't want). Once you're sure the surface is smooth, it's time to stencil. We used this super cute hand-drawn bunny design. I like to cut the corner off a stencil if there's space for it instead of writing on the back with a permanent marker. It seems to make it easier to peel the stencil off the clear foil backing (the carrier sheet) and there's only one way to line it back up. Plus I don't always have a permanent marker handy. Peel the stencil off its carrier sheet and center it onto your card. Because of the layer of crayon you don't have to fuzz the stencil before applying. Next, apply a small amount of water-based acrylic paint and spread it out over the stencil, fully covering the design. We used our fingers for this, but you can use a squeegee if you're not a fan of finger painting. Take off any access paint and remove the stencils (careful not to stretch it). Voila! Make sure to clean the stencil straight away or, if you can't do that for some reason, leave it to soak in a shallow tub of water until you're ready to clean it. Whatever you do, don't let the paint dry in the mesh part of the stencil. Finally, carefully take the painter's tape off and your card is done. stenciling on cars Yes, cars can be stenciled on using the same brand of water-based acrylic paint as used on the cards, believe it or not! Now, I confess that the logo on the van was stenciled on about a year ago, so not that recently. But it's still holding up great, despite being parked outside without shelter all year long and having gone through a bunch of (manual) car washes. Surprisingly, the acrylic paint is holding up nicely, yet it's easily scraped off using your fingernails if you want to get rid of it. We've done a few images on our van that we've decided to remove over time and it didn't leave any marks. It makes sense though, as it's metal and our All Surface type of stencils work on pretty much any smooth surface, metal included. Simply follow the instructions that we send with our stencils (no fuzzing needed for this surface BTW) and you can stencils anything onto your car from your logo or just a cool design. Just don't do it to someone else's car, unless you have their permission (or it's April Fools?). customized cake! Who doesn't love cake? Now, first off full disclosure - our stencils have not been tested to be FDA approved for food items. Whether you want to use them on cakes or cookies is up to you and at your won risk. But we did it and survived. For our daughter's 10th birthday she wanted a complete Harry Potter themed birthday party. And since she belongs to the Hufflepuff house, what else could go on her birthday cake but the Hufflepuff crest? So I bought the image online off an Etsy shop and created a stencil. I also made this delicious gluten-free cake, as one of her friends has Celiac. I used fondant for the first time in my life because I figured I could stencil onto that using homemade gluten-free icing with black food coloring in it. The icing turned out more grey/silver rather than black, but hey, I'm no professional baker. I rolled out the fondant and applied my stencil over the top. I lightly rolled the rolling pin over the stencil once and then applied the frosting with a squeegee. I wasn't quite sure it was going to work, but I couldn't have been more happy with the result once I peeled the stencil off! Next I placed the stenciled fondant over the cake and cut off the excess. I added icing all around the sides of the cake and created a border on the top and sprinkled on some white chocolate stars. Finally, you may now be wondering, "Well, which of these three things won't she be doing again?". The answer is, I'll be doing them all again! The one thing I have tried and won't be doing again is using water-based metallic acrylic paints. Why? Because I've tried them in the past, using silver and gold metallic paints (both water-based acrylics) and they work great the first time around. But they seem to have tiny metallic particles in them, which clog up the mesh in the silkscreen stencils. They're simply a nightmare to clean out of your silkscreens and I haven't been able to rinse them out of my stencils fully despite my best efforts. So I steer clear of anything metallic if I intend to reuse the stencil, even if it states that it's water-based paint or ink.
Now, over to you. Which of these 3 things I tried did you find the most interesting? Which one/ones would you like to try? Let me know in the comment section below and feel free to share pictures! Happy crafting! Mariette
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Ever wanted to give someone a custom glass as a gift? Perhaps a set of engraved wine glasses as a wedding gift, or a customized pint glass for Father's Day, or even a whole set of drinking glasses for your book club with your favorite quotes on them. The options are endless, but did you know that this is something you can make yourself? In this week's blog post I'll be tackling glass etching using our reusable silk screen stencils and etching cream. I'll be testing out two different brands of etching cream (Etchall and Cadence) AND I'll be testing out how many times I can reuse a single stencil before the etching cream "eats it up". Plus I'll be sharing some tips and tricks you don't want to miss out on. So if you want to create your own customized glasses, keep on reading :) Getting Ready Before I get into any details let me briefly explain my testing experiment with you. There were 3 questions on my mind:
To find out I bought these cute little glass jars I found in a local convenience store. Then using part of a design I already had, (Made with Love Kitchen Silkscreen), I made two identical silkscreen stencils - one for each brand of etching cream. Add onto that two brands of etching cream, gloves, a little spoon, an old plastic card, and a blue and red whiteboard marker to mark the jars so I knew which side was stenciled with what brand. And I was ready to go! I started out with 8 jars intending to stencil every jar twice on opposite sides. One side would be stenciled using Etchall and its corresponding stencil. The other side would be stenciled with Cadence using the other stencil. In the end I had to get more jars, but more on that later. Let's first have a look at the difference between the two brands. etchall vs. cadence There are many different brands of etching cream out there, but not all are suitable to be used with silkscreens. Some brands are simply too strong and will eat up your precious stencils quite quickly (Armour Etch is one of them). So it's important to know which brand of etching cream will work best. For my experiment I decided to test what I had on hand, which was Etchall reusable etching creme and Cadence Magic Glass. Overall both work well in combination with silkscreen stencils, but let's look at the stats, shall we? Etchall reusable etching creme Cadence Magic Glass Price $24.99 (about 24.25 Euros) 19.99 Euros (about $22.15) (via Etchall website, shipping not included) (on our web shop, shipping not included) Bottle content 118 ml / 4 US fl. Oz. 59 ml / 2 US fl. Oz. Reusable Yes No* (depends - see the update in text below) Waiting time 15 minutes 2 minutes Etching result Good Good Can be used on other Yes No surfaces As you can see both have pros and cons. Etchall is more expensive and the etching process takes significantly longer than with Cadence (especially if you only have one stencil to work with!). However, it's reusable so it'll last way longer. And you can use it to etch other surfaces besides glass, mirrors, and windows. I haven't tested it (yet), but it says you can use it on porcelain, slate, and marble as well. Cadence on the other hand works a lot faster and is less expensive (in the short term), but it does go down the drain after that first use. *Update - I have actually since this experiment reused Cadence etching cream when I was doing another bulk etching session. So you can't save the used etching cream for later, but you can still reuse it if you reuse it straight away (multiple times even). When I was testing I generally applied the Cadence etching cream first on one jar and let it sit. By the time I had applied the Etchall creme to the other jar, my Cadence jar would be ready to be rinsed off, cleaned and dried - done! Then I was left waiting for the Cadence stencil to dry (as it does need to be cleaned and dried in between uses) and waiting for the Etchall creme to cure and do it's thing. Hence how the afternoon of testing turned into a two day kind of ordeal. Do note though that I only had one stencil for each brand available, so waiting in between uses was inevitable. I would imagine you could easily work out a smooth system for both brands using a small number of stencils and a few alarm set on your phone. What that magic number is, I don't know (yet). Which brings me to the final question... One stencil - how many etchings??? I don't know. That's right, I said it: I still don't know! I was expecting to get about 8 etchings out of each stencil, which was perfect as the jars I got cam in an 8 pack. But the stencils were fine after 8 etchings (and 8 washes). So I went back to the shop the next day and bought another 8 jars. Guess what, the stencils are still holding up after another 8 etchings and washes. And that goes for both brands of etching creams. By now, both stencils have been through 16 washes, which is what I think is starting to wear on them (not the etching cream, but the washing). After about the first 8 washes, they started to want tot curl up before the transparent carrier sheet was applied again. They're not big so they're more likely to curl up after that many uses. And I stretched the Etchall all stencil on the side a bit when I was trying to peel it off the glass jar early on in the process. No big deal as the design didn't get stretched, but now the stretched side won't stay on the carrier sheet and so the adhesive on that spot dries out quickly. I don't know how many more etchings I'd be able to get out of them, but I've run out of jars, time, and patience for now. All in all, 16 etchings for one stencil is not a bad result at all. A recent customer of ours got about 8 etchings out of one stencil (she did nearly 50 etchings!). Her stencils were more detailed, though. And even though she thinks she's still able to get some more out of some of them, she was having trouble with the adhesive not working anymore. As I was doing my testing, I noticed that if I left my stencils out in the sun for too long, the adhesive would also dry out. A quick fix to this is to breathe onto the back of the stencil right before you stick it onto your surface. The moisture of your breath will be just enough to re-activate the adhesive. Alternatively, you could dab the back of your stencil with a damp cloth after yo take the clear carrier sheet off. To get the most out of your stencils when etching I would also suggest a different approach to cleaning your stencils. Usually, I suggest running it under warm (not hot) water and gently rubbing the front of the stencil with your fingers to remove any paint. In the case of etching, however, you rinse off the cream while the stencil is still on the glass surface. Rub it gently, while wearing gloves, while ti's on the glass. Then take off the stencil and simply hold it adhesive side up under some gently running water (not full blast). Then flip it over, right side facing you, and rinse it that way. No rubbing needed, just let the water do the job. If you're more of a visual type of learner, I made a short video of the whole etching project. Click here to see the video. the take-away Both Etchall and Cadence did great. I easily got 16 etchings out of each stencil with these brands.
I would highly recommend using more than one stencil if you're planning to etch more than 3 glasses (or if you're just very impatient) because you do need to wait for the stencils to dry in between etchings. Also, which brand to go with depends on your purpose/personal preference. If you're planning to do a bunch of etchings just one time, like a single project, then go with Cadence. It's quicker and with a couple of duplicate stencils you can churn out a decent amount of customized glasses. If you're doing a bunch in one go, then you can actually scrape off the excess etching cream and reuse this straight away on the next item to be etched. As long as you reuse the etching cream straight away, you can actually reuse it, you just can't save it for later once it's been used. If you're a dedicated crafter, however, who will be etching again and again (and perhaps on different surfaces too), then go with Etchall. Just do yourself a favor and have duplicate stencils and a system set up, so you don't forget about your etching projects and let them sit for longer than 15 minutes. I accidentally lost track of time a couple of times with Etchall, since the wait is longer and I did other stuff in between. But know that letting them sit for 25 minutes instead of 15 once or twice won't do any damage to your stencils. Now over to you, let me know if you liked this post. And if you have any questions let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you! Until next time, happy crafting! In this blog post I'll share with you all there is to know about the reusable self adhesive silkscreen stencils we make. What they are made of and, most importantly, how to use them and take care of them. So let's dive in shall we? All the stencils on our Etsy shop, SmartScreenStencils, are silkscreen stencils. We use Ikonart Stencil Films to create our custom stencils as they are of high quality and, unlike many other silkscreen stencils film, they're self adhesive. That means they have a tacky backside making them much easier to work with. These stencil films are blank and not yet fully developed when we get them. We add the design and finish up the developing process to create ready-to-use silkscreen stencils. Now let's get nerdy and see what the stencil films are made of so you can better understand how to use them - don't worry, this part won't take long. Above is an image from the Ikonart user guide. Note that the emulsion side and the Ikonart film mesh with the adhesive are actually ONE layer - the blue or purple stencil layer, depending on whether you have an All Surface stencil or a Fabric/Wood stencil respectively. To make it simple, let's pretend you have a blue stencil. The blue part of the stencil is the emulsion that covers the mesh (or fine screen - hence the name silkscreen stencil). The white part is the mesh where the paint, ink, or other kind of medium will go through, thus creating the design/print. While you cannot see this, the mesh actually runs throughout the entire stencil, making it strong yet flexible - perfect for stenciling both flat and rounded surfaces. Before we move onto how to use your stencil, let's take a closer look at the two types of silkscreens available: the All Surface and the Fabric/Wood. While both stencils are very similar in that they are easy-to-use, flexible, reusable, and you can reposition them (unlike vinyls), they do have their differences.
The All Surface silkscreen stencil is the original blue stencil and can be used on almost any type of surface provided it's clean and smooth. For example, it can be used on paper, cardboard, canvas, metal, natural clay, polymer clay, glass, ceramics, walls, plastic, tile, wood (sand first for best results), fabric/textile, etc.. This makes for a great all-round reusable stencil. The purple Fabric/Wood stencil on the other hand is slightly more sturdy and much stickier than the All Surface one. This makes it more suitable for stenciling on fabric/textile, wood, and other more textured surfaces. Don't try to use this on any smooth surface though as you won't be able to peel it off without stretching and thus destroying the stencil. Not to mention what will happen if you try to use this type of stencil on paper... No, this stencil is primarily for fabric and rough or textured wood stenciling. In later posts I'll go into more detail of stenciling on different types of surface and which type of stencil to use. Finally, for the more experienced and curious crafters, it may be important to know that the blue All Surface stencil has a mesh count of 120, whereas the purple Fabric/Wood stencil has a mesh count of 110. Now that you know all there is to know about silkscreen stencils, it's time to learn how to use them. I will cover this in my next post tomorrow. 1/8/2021 0 Comments Why stenciling sucksThat's right, this first blog post is going to be about why stenciling sucks. Isn't that ironic? (cue Alanis Morissette). But bear with me here. You see, in my mind honesty is important. We've all seen those neatly edited video's of seemingly perfect crafters who show you just how easy it is to create these amazing DIY projects that look like, well, perfect. You know, the ones you imagine making yourself and showing off to your friends, and they'll go like, "Wow, you actually MADE that?! That's amazing!" I hate to burst your bubble here, but stenciling isn't always that easy. Actually, chances are that if you're just starting, you'll find that stenciling can be quite frustrating - at times, that is. Here's the thing, like with most new projects you'll take on in life, you'll find that there's a learning curve. There's going to be projects that don't turn out the way you wanted. There's going to be smudged edges now and again, and I'm here to tell that that's okay. To be honest, when I first started stenciling I was scared. I'm not a perfectionist, but I'm one of those people who want to do things right the first time around - it has to be perfect regardless of the fact that I'm a novice at this. So instead of doing it, I procrastinate. It took me forever to make my first stencil (my husband was making the stencils long before I was) and when I finally made one I didn't use it. I was afraid that it wouldn't turn out the way I'd hoped. So I found excuse after excuse for why I couldn't do my project right now... I've read online about issues other people were having using stencils and instead of reading on to the advice they were given I was just turned off. Here's where I made a huge mistake. I forgot that when you're trying out something new there's always going to be a learning curve. And that's why when I finally did stencil for the first time and it smudged ever so slightly, I thought, " well, stenciling sucks." Why am I telling you all this? Because I wanted to let you know that if you're hesitating just like I was you're not alone. Trying something new can be scary or super exciting, or both, depending on your personality. The anticipation when you peel the stencil off for the first time and you get to see the result for you efforts is when most people either get hooked or never try again. I'm here to remind you that either way, things don't always go to the way we planned. And this is exactly the reason I decided to start a blog (and yes, this is my first blog ever and that's a whole other learning curve for me). This blog is meant for you and me both to explore all things silkscreens. They're so versatile and can be used in so many different ways and I get so many questions about them, which I hope to be able to answer here. I'll be testing and learning right here with you and share with you my tips and tricks along the way, as well as any mistakes and fails, so you can learn from my mistakes and my successes alike. Corny as it may sound, I do believe that sharing is caring. And I'm here to share my knowledge with you. Happy crafting! Mariette |
AuthorHi, I'm Mariette. I love crafting and make custom reusable silkscreen stencils, which I sell on our Etsy shop - SmartScreenStencils. ArchivesCategories |