Stencil Dilemma

So I started this whole mess by making my boyfriend a really cool sweatshirt for his birthday using a cardboard stencil of the spaceship Serenity from Firefly and a spay bottle with some bleach. A friend of his liked it so much he commissioned me to make about 20 shirts. I repeated the process only to find out that the cardboard is starting to show signs of wear. I'm almost done with the shirts but there's a chance he'll have me do the same to sweatshirts. Any ideas on longer lasting stencils? It needs to be something that fairly easy to cut with an exacto knife, will hold up to about 20 uses, and to have some sort of absorbency so that the excess bleach doesn't roll off to parts I don't want it to go.

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2 replies since 1st January 2012 • Last reply 1st January 2012

Reply #1:

I would put it on cardstock... then spray the cardstock with a kind of waterproof sealant on it. Then you could put a towel underneath it? I'm not exactly clear on the process you have :p

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Reply #2:

I'm sure I've seen somewhere that you can use transparencies (the clear sheets for overhead projectors) to make stencils - they'd be easy to cut and pretty durable. Not sure about the bleach getting underneath, although I guess if you were working on a flat surface it probably wouldn't be too bad. Otherwise, maybe a temporary adhesive to fix them down would work? :/

The sweatshirt and shirts sound really cool though, I'd love to see pictures if you're putting them up on here Happy

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