Stenciling with Shiva Paintstiks

Today I'm going to talk to you about using Shiva Paintstiks in your quilt making and in your garment making. Shiva Oil Paintstiks can be used to stencil or to rub, or to do direct paint. This table runner was done entirely with Shiva Paintstiks and it gives us a really nice applique look. You can also do more traditional things like this quilt here that has a nice kind of old-fashioned look, looks like some Victorian applique and very, very easy to use, very simple with stencils. But Shiva can also be used for garments and this stencil was done on raw silk.

The Shiva Paintstiks are very, very washable you can put them in the washing machine and the dryer and they're permanent and color-fast. So now let me tell you about the products that we need to use to paint with the Shiva Paintstiks. First of all it's the paint. We have two different types of paint, the Professional and the Iridescent. The Professionals are packaged in a brown packaging and the Iridescent in a blue packaging so they're easy to tell apart.

The Iridescent are shiny and the Professional are matte. The matte comes in about 108 colors, and the Iridescent only in about 20 colors. I tend to use the Iridescent most, because I really like that shininess but they're both really great products and they can be used with each other. You also need some good brushes, stencil brushes if you're gonna be stenciling. You can do a direct application with a crayon and not use a brush but for most applications you're using stencil brushes.

You can buy stencil brushes that are made for the Shiva Paintstiks that have a really short bristle or you can cut down stencil brushes that you already have. Cut them so they're about a quarter of an inch long. You're also going to need something to clean your brushes with. And this is a great product made by the company who makes the Paintstiks and it's an orange cleaner, but you can also use any type of other oil paint cleaner. The best thing that you need to have around for painting is baby wipes.

Baby wipes have lanolin in them and that lanolin easily removes the oil Paintstiks from your skin, the surface of your table top, anything like that. But remember that as soon as it hits fabric it's permanent. Now you can use commercially made stencils such as these to stencil with, they are slippery, however, so it's hard to get them to stay in place. You can master it and they are simple to use, but I generally use freezer paper stencils that I've cut myself. You want to find freezer paper it's usually in the bottom shelf at your grocery store in the paper goods aisle.

You'll also need something to cut the stencils with. You can use a regular craft knife, or an X-acto knife like this, but my favorite tool is the Swivel knife. The Swivel knife fits on your finger like a pencil and so it's really easy for you to guide it as you cut. I like to cut multiple stencils at one time so I also need to have a stapler and a staple remover. And if your stencil has any fine small dots, polka dots or circles on it then a hole punch is really good too.

So now let's get on to our project. Here's the block that we're going to paint today and I got it from this design that I drew. I knew I wanted and eight inch block so I simply drew a design that would fit into an eight inch square. This is just printed on regular copy paper but then I transferred it onto freezer paper. You can do this by laying the freezer paper on top of the printed design and tracing it, or if you can get this design into your computer by scanning it then you can print this directly on your ink jet printer.

Don't put freezer paper through a laser printer though, because it's a heat process and it will melt the wax all over the place, so just ink jet printers. Once I have the block the size I need it to be on the freezer paper then I cut as many more pieces of freezer paper as I need to make blocks. So if I want three blocks then I'll cut three more pieces of paper, or two more pieces of paper and I'm gonna stack them directly behind the printed paper and staple them together. So I want to keep the staples away from the gray areas, the shaded in areas because those are the areas I'm going to cut out. And I want to put enough staples in there just to hold the whole thing together.

So here's how we cut it and I'm using the Swivel knife, and the Swivel knife fits on your finger like you have a pencil at the end of your finger and you simply want to keep the edge of the knife as close to the marked line as you possibly can. Because the knife is a swiveling knife, it moves for you and you don't really have to do a whole lot of moving of the paper. If you're using a craft knife, however, you'll have to move the paper a bit more so that you can get a smooth cut. The knives can easily go through three or four layers, I try not to cut more than that at one time. If I try to do more than that then I end up with jagged edges.

The knife doesn't require you to use a whole lot of pressure but a little bit of pressure. Make sure you keep your fingers out of the way so that you don't cut them, because the blade is very, very sharp. Okay, there we go. Now I'm just going to pop out the rest of these circles with a hole punch and the stencil's ready to use. I just need to separate it.

So I'm gonna use a staple remover so that I don't damage the stencils. The stencils are pretty sturdy, but you can tear them. It's not that big of a deal, however, because you simply iron them in place and kind of mend that tear as you iron them down. So now we have three identical stencils and we're ready to go ahead and paint our block. As we get ready to start painting the first thing we have to do is put our stencil onto our fabric.

So you want to center it in the middle of the square and you're gonna iron it down. Make sure that none of the portions of the stencil are turned upright so that the wax is showing to the top, otherwise it'll stick to your iron instead of sticking to the fabric. Set the iron down by lifting it up and moving it rather than by scooting it. And make sure things are just attached and once you know that they're in the right place then go ahead and leave the iron on for a few seconds about to a count of five on each area to make sure that the stencil's very well adhered to the fabric. Okay now we're ready to paint.

We're gonna start with this block and then finish up on another block that I've already got partially painted. But first we need to prepare the paints. The paints come with a skin on them when they're brand-new and that skin's pretty thick. It has to be removed with a craft knife and you want to just peel it like it's a very, very expensive potato, taking as little of the paint away as possible. After it's been skinned the first time, every time you use it after that you can simply rough it up with a paper towel to remove the skin.

Make sure there's no little bits of skin caught in the paint however, because that can transfer to your fabric. Your paint brush is a stencil brush again and it needs to be about a quarter inch long, if it's any longer than that you can go ahead and shorten it with a pair of scissors by cutting it down. So we're gonna start with this piece with gold in the center, and I tend to use paper plates for palettes. If you are to put the paint right on top of your stencil like this, little flakes of paint can get on your fabric and you don't want that to happen. So you need something to work off of.

So you can see here that I'm just gonna rough the brush over the tip of the paint to load the brush, and then I'm going to wipe off any excess on my paper plate. And I'm gonna take it to the center of the flower here and I'm gonna start adding paint to the center. Because this paint is not liquid, it's in an oil form it has no viscosity, that means it can't move on it's own, it's not gonna run into another area you have to push it into that area. So here I'm pushing it into the areas I want it to go into, and I'm actually shading it out here into the flower petals. Once I've done that I'm gonna go ahead and add the next color which is a copper.

And I'm gonna do the same thing, I'm gonna load my brush off of the paint stick, kind of work it into the brush, and then I'm gonna start painting the petals. I'm gonna work away from the paper edge into the center of the petal. And then work back into the paper edge so that I get a nice crisp edge. I'm gonna go ahead and do this all the way around the flower. I have to add paint usually with every single petal.

Once I have all the petals done, I'm gonna go head back with the gold paint and I'm gonna pull that paint back into the petals again. I'm doing this while the paint is wet, and it's called a wet application. You can also do this after the paint is dried and not have as much of a flow from one color to the other, just like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and move to a block that I've already got almost completed and finish it up. Here I've painted the center already, painted the gold surround and now I'm doing the red on the ends.

Whenever you're painting on a dark fabric like this with the iridescents you're going to have a little bit of show through with the base fabric, which is really nice it gives you a nice shadowy effect. But you can see how much I have to work the paint into the surface. You want to try to use a stencil brush that is size appropriate for the area that you're gonna be painting in. I have a pretty big brush here because I have a pretty big area for this red color. I'm gonna go ahead and add gold to the last few little dots here, these little circles.

And then I'm gonna highlight the tips of these red petals with gold also. Color blending is really easy with these Paintstiks and it can be done wet or dry and if you don't like what you do, you simply paint over it. Okay, now we're going to remove the stencil from the paper. You can wait until it's somewhat dry if you want to, a couple of hours or you can do it right away. I am not good at waiting, so I usually do it right away.

It's easy to pull them off and if you're not gonna use the stencil again you can just rip it off. But if you think you want to use the stencil again and you can use it up to about five or six times then you want to remove it somewhat carefully. So I tend to remove the outside edge first and make sure you don't touch the painted areas, cause you can smear them, and once the outside edge is removed any little pointy areas like these areas here, I lift up with the X-acto knife so that I don't tear the stencil. And once all those areas are lifted up then I can pull the stencil off. And there we go our finished block.

Now this block has to dry for about 24 hours before we can heat set it. They do need to be heat set and this block here, the one I painted earlier, yesterday is dry and it's ready to be heat set. The heat setting process is very, very important if you want to be able to launder your projects that have the paint on them. They need to be heat set for about 10 to 15 seconds per area that has paint on it. You want to have your iron set on a heat that the base fabric can handle so mine's cotton and so I have the iron set on cotton and I'm simply gonna set the iron down and count to 10 and then move it to another area count to 10 again.

You can smell the linseed oil when you iron these but that smell will go away it'll entirely dissipate in about two to three days. And now our block is finished. It's permanent it's ready to use and it can be washed and put in the dryer just like any other quilt or garment. And that's how we paint with Shiva Paintstiks. Here are two very different quilts that are made using Shiva Paintstiks in their entirety.

This first one is a much more modern look than the one behind it. It features stenciled flowers and a painted background along with a machine quilted poem. The flowers are stenciled using freezer paper stencils that I cut and designed and they're shaded with lots of different colors in them. The background was painted after it was quilted and it has these fine lines of gold that were done with a direct application of the gold crayon. The second quilt is pieced in a nine patch formation with borders.

Each of the blocks was painted with a Shiva Paintstiks using a stencil and then it was pieced after it was painted it was also very, very heavily machine quilted and that quilting in the background allows the painted areas to come into the foreground and really, really look like hand applique. I hope that you can see how easy it is to add Shiva Paintstiks to your quilts and move into surface design. It's a really fun way to create.