Quilting Stencils Using Soft Modeling Paste

As an artist I'm always looking for ways to make my art truly my own and unique from others. And whether you are a traditional quilt maker or somebody who's a little bit more on the modern side, it really doesn't matter, there's all sorts of techniques that you can do that you can add just a little bit of extra something to the piece. One of those things that I like to do is a new product that I'd never used before on fabric and didn't realize that I could, but it's called soft modeling paste and you can do so many different things with it. You can stencil with it, which is what I'm going to do today and what I really like to do the most, but you can also embed things in it. You can actually paint with it if you want to and you can put it on the surface and then run textured items in it to give a texture to the surface. The nice thing about it is that it stays soft. So it's pliable and that the quilt can still move. It's not gonna crack off the surface. When we look at this piece which is almost ready to be quilted, we can see that there's lots of different layers on it and I've used lots of mediums but it's all fabrics with one exception, and that's this weird paper that's on there too. But the piece is still pretty soft. It can still be moved around and it can be quilted. So I'm gonna be able to quilt through all these layers. What you see here that's gold is a design that was put down with that soft modeling paste. The product is white, but then it can be painted or anything else that you want to afterwards. You can also paint it before you use it. So you could tint it whatever color you want it to be and then not have to paint the finished product. But it's a really, really easy product to stencil with, probably the easiest stenciling you'll ever do. So let me show you how you do this real quick. What you'll need is that soft modeling paste, and there's lots of different brands and different adjectives for it. This one calls it a light modeling paste and it's simply a medium. This is something that painters, fine art painters have been using for a long time to give texture to the surface of their paintings. And we quilters, we just love to borrow things from other art mediums. You'll also need some tape to hold your fabric down with, some sort of scraper that you can use to scrape across the surface, and a stencil. So I've got this stencil here and it's nice if your scraper can fill the bulk of the space that you're going to be stenciling. But you don't want a scraper that's so long that you can't get equal weight on it. So I'm gonna start by taping down my fabric, and that way it won't move while I'm working on it. I'm also going to tape down my stencil so it doesn't move while working on it either. When I do this, I tape the tape across the stencil, the fabric, and the table so that it doesn't move or shift. Make sure that when you do this that you don't cover up any of the opened areas on the stencil that you plan on stenciling with. And just make sure it's nice and secure. So now I'll open my container. And you can see here that this looks like whipped marshmallow. It's really easy to work with. I'm going to pull out some of the product and I'm simply going to lay it down on the fabric. And I'm gonna pull it into the stencil design. And I pull in both directions. Now I'm gonna make sure that I don't fill designs that I don't really want to. So if I was really concerned about this I could have filled that up with tape, but I'm actually just gonna come in here and add that leaf, and the swirl here on the top, as well as these polka dots. But I'm just not gonna get that big swirl. There we go. Now I'm gonna remove the bulk of the excess here and get it off of my scraper. And then I'm going to do a final pull so that I don't end up with any rough areas in the design. So this is gonna be a little gentler. Make sure it's nice and smooth. And now I'm ready to remove my stencil. Now, I'm not gonna worry about the product on the outside edge there because that's part that I can cut off of the fabric. And there we go. So now all I have to do is wait for this to dry. It takes about, in dry weather, probably 20 to 30 minutes to be dry, in humid weather, probably two to three hours. Once it's dry, I can cut this up and piece it into a quilt if I want to, or I could paint it first. I like to paint it first, if I'm going to paint it, because if I mess it up, I don't have to remove it from the quilt afterwards. If my piece is not perfect, I don't worry about that because I like my work to look like it was made by a human, not by a machine. I like those little imperfections, those things that say this was handmade by somebody. If you don't want to paint this, there's lots of other that you can impart color in here. There are products that you can sprinkle on it. You can use makeup grade glitter and sprinkle it into the wet medium. You can also use dry pigment powders and sprinkle that into the medium, too. Or if you like it white, especially if you're doing something like snowflakes for a winter quilt, you can just leave it the white that it is. I hope you'll give this a try. There's lots of other mediums you can try too. These are all wonderful ways to raise the surface and add that personal touch to your work.