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Wedding Stencil

Using Stencils for Your Paper Crafts

Hi, I hope you can help me.

I am looking for a stencil "wedding invitation" as I am making my daughters wedding cards.

I have tried so many different sites with no luck.

Hope you can help.

Raphaela

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You don’t mention whether you want to emboss or paint your daughter’s wedding invitations using stencils so I will address both techniques.

The Fiskars ShapeBoss system features many stencil sets that would be suitable for embossing or coloring your invitations. There are elegant borders and flourishes, flowers, Victorian designs and alphabets.

Stenciled letters have their limitations because of the need to hold the plastic template together. Fiskars has the only alphabet stencils that I feel would be formal enough for a wedding invitation.

Heritage Handcrafts makes brass stencils that are suitable only for embossing. The brass allows for more finely detailed designs than plastic. I found a good selection on their site.

eBay also has some offers for Heritage Handcraft stencils and specifically a stencil called “Wedding”. However there are no photos so you would have to take a chance.

Thinking “outside the box”, I have a couple of other ideas you might want to look into. WeddingClipArt.com sells ready-made and editable card templates using popular file formats, like Microsoft Word.

Just one click will download the template to your local hard drive for editing. By combining images and templates, you can create a personalized, highly coordinated and sophisticated look for all your wedding artwork, from invitations to thank you’s, and from photo albums to business cards.

WeddingClipArt templates are designed for you to print your cards using your computer printer. But I don’t see why you couldn’t use the design to cut your own stencil template. You need a cutting mat (link), a very sharp craft knife (link), a stencil blank and a steady hand.

If you lack the steady hand or the self-confidence to tackle cutting your own stencil, SCM Engraving Company has a product that can do this for you.

They sell 8 ½ by 11 inch adhesive backed sheets that use a copy machine or laser printer to reproduce artwork to a stencil for engraving. The company says, “Simply copy or print your design onto the stencil film sheet, peel off the backing to expose the adhesive and place on the surface you wish to engrave.”

Now since you do not want to do a single engraving but rather multiple copies using a stencil, you would copy your invitation onto two of the adhesive backed sheets with one of them in reverse. Rather than sticking the top sheet onto a “surface you wish to engrave”, you would very very carefully line it up and stick it onto the reverse sheet of your design.

You would have to deal with pieces that “fall out”.

There are two ways to do that. You can eliminate them in the design itself before having it copied.

If that results in too stenciled (cut-up) a look, you can deal with the “fall out” by creating stencils within stencils. For example, if the interior of your rose falls out of the main stencil, make a mini-stencil of the rose’s interior. Obviously, it will be easier to keep your design simple – simply elegant.

The engraving sheets are 75 cents each or $60 for 100. This is a clever product.

Another method of making stencils uses Grafix Stencil Sheets which allow you to create or copy designs and turn them into templates instantly.

Simply draw or trace a design with a pen, cut out with scissors or a utility knife and you're ready to stencil. This is a more economical method of making stencils.

Either the sheets or film is made out of tough, non-tear .007 Mylar which easy to cut and perfect for making stencils that can be used over and over again.

It would be a good idea to use a self-healing cutting mat and a good craft knife, like the X-acto Craft Swivel Knife.

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