Stencils for Applique

I have been making lots of appliqued onesies, and I wanted to share with you what I have been making. I love to make the onesies with the initials of the baby, or the tie onesie, but I wanted to do something different. While strolling through the aisles at Jo-Anns one day, I came across some stencils and a light bulb went off in my head.... why not use the stencils for my onesies?  Here are a few I have made:

You can see the duck and car stencils I used behind the onesies in this picture!

And for a sweet newborn named Abbigail, I made this:

I found the stencils in the craft paint aisle... one of the packages had 48 stencils in it for around $4.99. Not a bad price (and with a 40% coupon, even better!)  They also come in different sizes too ... the ones I got are about 4 1/2 inch ones, but they come bigger and smaller than that.

They also had packages of alphabet stencils:

I really love this "A" that I made for Abbigail embellished with a little silk rosette that I stitched on.

These are sew easy to do.... just iron some Heat n Bond or Wonder Under to the wrong side of your fabric. Then trace the stencil onto the paper backing, cut out the shape, iron it to the item and then zig zag stitch around it (don't forget to put your freezer paper underneath when you sew - check out my previous post about that here.)

No need to limit yourself to baby items either - you can use this for your toddler or children items too. I also like that they included so many different shapes in the stencil pack - snowman, cats and dogs, nautical items, a birthday cake (which I will be using to embellish a birthday shirt for a soon to be 5 year old!), boy and girl silhouettes, hearts.. the list goes on and on!  So much fun, and so much easier than trying to find shapes on the internet, print them out to the correct size, etc. etc.!

I sure hope you give this a try.  :)


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