I really love my Silhouette Machine.  It is so much fun to play around with and it can do so many things!  I love making vinyl stickers.  Luckily, I’ve been able to control myself and my entire house is not covered in vinyl sticker!  I had seen various pins on pinterest on how to use your Silhouette Machine to stencil.  I thought this was so interesting and I couldn’t wait to try it.  The only drawback was that the Silhouette vinyl is so expensive!  So I did a little research and found that it was possible to use regular (cheap) contact paper in the silhouette machine!  I mean, HOW AWESOME IS THAT!  That stuff is like $2.99 a ROLL!  So I researched online how to use it and played around with the settings a bit and after thinking I ruined my machine (which I did not) I decided that the settings needed to be: (*Please see the disclaimer at the end of the post)

SPEED 8*

THICKNESS 3*

BLADE 1*

NO CUTTING MAT.*

These are what worked for me* do your own research and see what works for you.*

I wanted to try my hand at using the Silhouette to stencil since I had seen so many great projects using stencils made on the Silhouette. 

The first stencil project I did I tried using a wood plaque that I bought at Jo-Ann's Fabrics.  You can see it primed white in this picture all the way to the right:

 

I chose a quote and using the Silhouette machine and Contact Paper, I made this:

Again, I have no pictures of the process since it was before I decided to blog, but the contact paper worked great for this project.

But I became more inspired when I found these on sale during another trip Jo-Ann's:

I painted one yellow and one red.

 

I then chose 2 quotes from the Silhouette Studio Store and printed them out on vinyl.

Here's one.  I tried to use regular contact paper* at first, and it worked just as well as it did when I tried it on the wood... that is until I tried to transfer it to the canvas... then it wouldn't come off the transfer paper!  It was very frustrating.  I finally resorted to using the Silhouette vinyl.  So much for saving money on this project, but, as you will see, I think it was worth it.

Here is the vinyl design on the canvas
 

It looked good like this that I almost left it like this, I mean how easy would that be to paint canvas, print off vinyl and stick it on there!  But I was really going for a stencil look.

I had read the secret to making good stencils is to paint over the stencil with the base color, so I did that (sorry for the blurry image)  I also did that with the wood plaque that I made:

when that was fully dried, I painted the final color:



I let that dry and peeled the letters off:

At first I was really upset with the bleed trough that I got on this piece, especially since I thought I took precautions to prevent that,  but since the bleed through was pretty uniform throughout the whole design, I think it added to the overall design.

The second one I did came out with a lot cleaner lines.  I am very pleased with the way both canvases turned out. 

 

I ended up hanging all three quotes in my boys' bathroom.  Hopefully they will look at them often and be inspired by the quotes.

*Disclaimer: I’m pretty sure Silhouette recommends using only Silhouette brand vinyl in their machines.  Use contact paper at your own risk.