Review: Stencil 101

What a dang fine innovation – craft book as craft tool!

Stencil 101 is not only a how-to book on stenciling, it’s a book of cool, precut stencils. Ed Roth is something of a stencil genius – you may have seen his work on Martha.

The 25 designs are super-great. You can see several on the book cover, and more on the back, which you can see at Amazon. They’re all made from heavy laminated paper, so they can be cleaned and reused.

(And because Chronicle’s good like that, the stencil pages are all perforated, and there’s a storage pocket to keep them in.) This is probably a good time to mention that all these stencil designs are copyrighted for personal use only – no resales.

Totally love this owl. And by the way, Ed has even more stencils and stencil sets available at his website (scroll down on that link).

In addition to all the stencils, there’s a great how-to section that should get even the most novice stenciler up and running.

And then, there’s a series of projects that explain how to apply stencils to several different surfaces: wood, t-shirts, shoes, greeting cards, lampshades, cakes.

Freakin’ awesome. My only complaint being that this is exactly the wrong time of year for me to get all obsessed with a new craft. Hmmm . . . who on my list needs a monkey-emblazoned tee?