LifeBook Catch-Up Week 25: Stenciling Fun!

Week 25 of LifeBook was brought to us by Lynzee Lynx. It was a fun lesson: we got to make our own stencils and play with them to our heart's content. The lesson included a meditation and healing exercise, but I was too excited about making stencils so I had to skip those. I just couldn't wait to play with my new toy, a Cut Master stencil cutter.

Many of you will be familiar with this clever tool, but in case you're not, I'll tell you a bit about it. It looks like a soldering iron with a sharp tip. It heats up to a high temperature and melts the stencil plastic as you guide it along. Obviously, it will not give you the precise, intricate lines of commercially available stencils or the ones produced by die-cutting machines, but I like the organic shapes you can make this way. It takes a little patience and more than a little caution (I managed to burn my finger!) but it's so rewarding to be able to cut out your own designs. Of course, you could just use a craft knife to achieve similar results but I've never been able to handle one, especially along curves. This is what the tip of the Cut Master looks like:

and these are the stencils I made for this project:

It was so much fun putting these stencils into action! I first painted a sheet of watercolour paper with three coordination fluid acrylics for the background. I was supposed to leave some white space, but I just couldn't help myself! Then I went beserk with stenciling using paynes grey and white acrylics with a sponge dabber and finished it off with some doodling in black, white and gold paint pens. I also sprinkled some black and white high flow acrylics all over the page to jazz it up a bit. I made three of these pages in different colour schemes. I will make them into a foldout page for my LifeBook. Fold-out pages add a lot of interest to a journal, making it more interactive. Now that I have quite a few pages completed, I can't wait to bind my book at the end of the year!