How to Use Quilting Stencils on Your Fabric

Stencils are a popular way to transfer designs onto a quilt. And today I'd like to show you some methods for doing that. This was a little quilt that I made many years ago, and it was before I had my long arm machine and started quilting professionally. So at that time I pretty much had to either do stitch in the ditch or buy stencils to transfer designs. And at the quilt store, I found this one called the perfect spiral, which I really like because depending on where you align it on your quilt depended on where the emphasis was. So by putting it up here, I got shorter spirals and then down here they're longer because I moved off center. But you could do it on center and it was just a great little, stencil for simple quilting. Like I said before, I got into the long arming and they also have it in a mini size, stencils also come with different designs on them that you can put on borders and in sashing, inside the block, I mean the amount of designs is almost limitless. So today I want to show you some methods for transferring the stencil to your fabric. Here i have an array of different items. The first is a chubby crayon. It is a chalk actually it's like a wax chalk. It's more waxy, more like a tailor's chalk that works very well for marking your quilt. The next art little chalk pens that when you take them off, you fill the inside of the tube with the chalk and it's a powder, chalky powder and then as you roll it along, it comes out of the tip there and gives a very fine mark. And it comes in different colors, the white for your dark fabric and the blue of course, for your lighter fabrics. We also have some marking pens this is a cloth marker and it says it will wash out and that also works just like pencil and comes in different colors. So let me show you very quickly here. How each of these works in an actual stencil. Now I like this chubby one because I can get a sharp point off it more so than the tailor's chalk. And so when I get ready to mark my stencil, I just run it in the line and I usually go back and forth a couple of times just to make sure that I've got it marked and as you can see it comes out very, very nicely and it is something that will stay. It's not going to wash away there's a product called a pounce pad and you basically it's a little almost like beanbag and you just tap it along here and the line goes on, but it's with a chalk and if you're doing any type of length of quilt, it has the potential to rub off before you're all the way to the end so I prefer one of these other marketing methods better. This one is actually a chalk type of powder but like it because it's quick and it's easy and I get a nice line. I find sometimes if you don't have enough contrast or dark enough line, you won't be able to see it under your sewing machine. And obviously that can lead to problems also. The final one is this cloth marker it's like a pencil and when I run it through, you get the line you can see it's not quite as distinct. And then the residue that's on here will usually just rub off or you can wipe it off with a cloth. Now, how about removing this because you don't want those lines to stay after they're quilted. Well you can rub it off with another piece of fabric and get most of that chubby pen off. Again it is a wash out so that when you put water on it, it will disappear and you don't necessarily have to launder the whole quilt, but you can just take a cloth with some water on it and move it that way. The chalk because it's waxy chalk tends to stay on and the other one, the little powder one tends to rub off again, when it doesn't come off with your finger, just rub it with another piece of fabric and it's gone. And that's about all you need to do with your stitching in there to get it off. So how do I get this one off? Because it's a wax, very simple i just iron it, maybe give it a little bit of a steam and it's gone. As you can see it doesn't work on that or this one, but the iron works very, very well on the, chubby crayon, which is similar to tailor's talk. So I hope you'll have fun picking out different stencils and hopefully with the right tools, your markings will stay throughout the quilting process. And be very, very pleased with your results.