TUTORIAL: Stenciling Dish Towels

I picked up these flour sack towels and stenciled them.

1. Lay your towel out on a flat surface; make sure you have a paper towel underneath the flour sack.

2. I used black ink, but you could use any color.

3. I used a stencil brush.

4. Keep brushing your stencil brush over the ink till yur brush has enough ink on the bristles.

5. Lay your stencil on top of the towel, on the center fold of the towel.
(Most towels will already be prefolded so find the middle of the towel.

6. For my 123 towel, I put the stencil opening with the two directly on the center line of the towel. Dab or rub your brush all on the opening of the number two till it is filled with black ink.

7. Now for the number one, move to the left of the two, eye the space between the numbers, lay the stencil down again and redab your brush on the ink and apply to the towel the same way.

8. Number 3 is to the right of the two and repeat as with number 1 and 2.

9. "BE CAREFUL" to not rub onto any other opening of other numbers or you will get black spots as I got. You may want that look anyway. Many sacks that were made out of burlap and linen have smudge marks or numbers or letters blurry.

10. Now iron the piece with a paper towel over the numbers. This makes the numbers more permanent into the fabric so it will not wash out.

I then did one with the word "Paris" on it. I love white towels and writing or symbols on the fabric. It adds a little interest in your kitchen.

Finished Tutorial and Views of all transfers

Going from Left to Right
Gel Medium on water color paper. The first went bad, the second I blow dryed and waited longer

The third one is the image with gel medium put on the surface of the image and the brown paper. They were bone folded, breyered with the wall paper seamer, blow dried a few times for a few minutes waiting for about 30 minutes, then wetting with water and rubbed off. A light coating of gel medium was rubbed into the surface for the image to come out clearer and the tag rumpled up a bit.

The fourth one is the packing tape. This was the second one. The cheap tape or cheap printer paper may have been the problem here. Remember I mentioned that the magazine images come out a bit better. When you are making one out of a magazine, you can actually let the image sit in water overnight before you rub the paper off of the tape.

The fifth image you are seeing is just the ink jet copy that was wet and layed on top of water color paper. It held up well. I blew it dry and am keeping it for another project.