I've been watching the message boards to see what you all are looking for in terms of design team projects, and this week, it seems to be stencils. There are a ton of things that you can do with stencils, and scrapbooking companies are coming out with amazingly cute designs to play with, but as I said in my post last week, my Silhouette really is my favorite toy. So, of course, I made my own stencil.
I've had this shape in my Silhouette Studio library for ages, but I haven't had a specific project to use it on, so today, I'm starting with the shape and challenging myself to make it work. The first step in the process was to convert the shape from a card background to a stencil. This was a fairly simple process, just removing a frame from the outside of the shape (this has already been done in the image above).
In a new Silhouette Studio file, I opened the shape and rotated it 90 degrees (just because that's how it will fit best on my stencil material).
You can see in this image that there is a frame around the outside of the tree shape. That's great if I wanted to use this for a card background, but since I want to use it as a stencil for mixed media work, I'd like more space around the edges of the image to be protected from my modeling paste, ink, and/or paint. All that I have to do is to delete the extra frame.
First, select the image, right click, and select release compound path. All that this does is to tell the program to think of every closed shape within the image as its own separate cut (as opposed to part of a whole).
For some images, you might be able to just delete the pieces you don't want at this point, but for this one (and most complex shapes that I've encountered) I also had to ungroup all of the cut shapes in the image (a choice in the same right click drop down menu). I selected the rectangle surrounding the tree image and deleted it.
Now, the image is ready to cut from plastic stencil material. These are the settings I chose to cut the image.
Ok, I'm done talking about my Silhouette for the rest of this post. I promise. Here's the stencil I made.
Laying it down on the vanilla cardstock, I smoothed the modeling paste over the stencil.
I lifted the stencil up right away, cleaned it off, and allowed the paste to dry. Once it's dry, apply a light layer of mod podge, or acrylic paint to seal the mod podge (I don't know that this step was necessary, but it still felt a bit fragile when it was dry, so I went ahead).
Now, the background is ready to start building the layout. I printed these 3 photos I took in September at Magic Kingdom, on my Polaroid POGO printer.
They are 2x3 photos, but I figured that they were about the right size for an 8x8 page. I wanted to add some color to the background, and I did so with fabric paint, October Afternoon sprinklers, and black stickles. I wanted to be able to drip the fabric paint and stickles, so I just watered them down, which worked just fine.
I know this looks really messy, but most of it will get covered up. I used This orange and black patterned paper to ground the photos and matted them with adheisive backed cork. I adhered the paper to the background with foam tape so that I didn't have to try to glue anything to the modeling paste.
I decided that I would hide my journaling, not because it was private, just because I wanted to include that cute orange polka dotted pouch from Recollections. For the rest of my embellishment, I used some brads and ribbon, I cut the back off the brad that would have had to go through the modeling paste with wire cutters and glued it (and the ribbon) down with Glossy Accents (I used glossy accents because I couldn't find my hot glue gun). To finish it off, inked the edges with Distress ink. Here's the finished project. I hope you like it! 
I hope you will get out your artsy supplies. Don't be afraid to use them on your layouts!
If you wanted the recipe for the modeling paste, here it is:
1 part acrylic paint
1/2 part glue
1 part baking soda (or any powder whose texture you like: maybe talcum powder or sand)
Mix it together and keep it in an airtight container.
While you're here, enter to win the giveaway from www.scrappingtherainbow.com
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