Quilting Stencils

Hopscotch from Super Simple Quilts with Alex Anderson & Liz
Aneloski

About three years ago I decided to start quilting.  My very first project was a small baby quilt for my niece.  I wasn't sure if she was going to be a niece or nephew so I went with a gender neutral blanket made out of different colors of polka dot fabric.  One thing I learned right away with this project is that they weren't kidding when they said 1/4in seam.  By the time all was said and done I was able to make this quilt come together but it took some finagling.  I was very proud of how the first one turned out but didn't do much actual quilting on this.

Since then I have made three more baby quilts and currently am working on my first large quilt.  One thing I learned was the importance of knowing where I was going when quilting.  I bought a couple pre-made stencils to help with this but they didn't seem to fit the way I wanted them to.

I decided to use my Silhouette Cameo to cut out a stencil that I could re-size. I found a stencil image I liked and imported it into the Silhouette Studio Software program.



After a little bit of tedious work resizing and editing points I was able to create a file that gave me exactly what I wanted in the size I wanted it.

The next decision I made was what type of media I would use to the cut the stencil.  I was hoping for something that would be easy to use but would also hold up for many uses.  I decided to use freezer paper.  I thought this would be helpful because freezer paper sticks to fabric with a little light ironing.

Everything cut well but after a couple uses the small detailed edges of the design started folding and it made it difficult to really put the chalk down. So after some more thought I decided a combination of contact paper and cheese cloth would be the perfect solution.

This worked really well once again for a couple uses.  The same thing started happening with this one where the inside corners started popping up making it difficult to run in the chalk.

So for a final try I am going to use laminated cardstock as the base and see how that works.
I changed the settings on the Cameo to cut heavy card stock and then added some Krylon Easy-Tack to the back to help keep it down.

I am hoping that eventually I will get to the point where I don't need to use a stencil and will just be able to feel where the lines are supposed to go but definitely am not there yet.

Here is the finished product.  At some point I will go into detail on the quilts themselves!  Hope you enjoyed the ramblings!