Products Used
- Crafter’s Square 8″ x 8″ canvas panel from Dollar Tree
- Cricut stencil vinyl
- FW Pearlescent Liquid Acrylic in Galactic Blue
- FW Pearlescent Liquid Acrylic inSundown Magenta
When I first whipped out the stencil vinyl, I thought “I’m going to start with a simple, basic project.”
…
I was wrong…so. so. so wrong…
On my latest IG post, you’ll notice that the time lapse process video is (as per usual) right under one minute long. When the video clips were first imported into Premier for editing, it was an hour and nineteen minutes! FOR A SIMPLE STENCIL CANVAS!!! THAT IS RIDICULOUS!! I had oh so much difficulty trying to weed the excess vinyl away and even more struggle removing the stencil vinyl from the transfer tape.
To start with, I used a previously obtained hummingbird design that I had not yet used for a project and added the circles around it to fit the canvas and give it more dimension. The stencil vinyl had no trouble cutting on the Cricut and at first glance, it looked like it was going to be a pretty straightforward project. Then I had to start weeding. The weeding was a challenge. I don’t know if it was me, the design, or the vinyl (because this was my first attempt at using stencil vinyl), but weeding this little 7 1/2″ design took almost half an hour. Each time I’d lift some of the excess, the pieces that were supposed to stay would lift up, move around, stick somewhere else, and generally cause trouble. A lot of cussing ensued, but I got it done. Once I laid the transfer tape down and positioned it onto the canvas square, I thought the hard part was over.
Again, I was wrong…so, so wrong.
What is normally just a carefully, but rather simple peeling away of the transfer tape took 35 minutes to remove. I know what you may be thinking: the transfer tape was too high tack. However it is a piece that has been reused about a dozen times and even stuck to my shirt to lessen the tack prior to this use to help reduce exactly this issue. No fuzzy reused transfer tape was ready for this challenge. The vinyl did NOT want to stick down to the canvas board, so it took a lot of coaxing with a hook to get it all in place The transfer tape had to be cut away piece by piece as it was finally free of the stencil vinyl. Again, a lot of cussing ensued, but I got it done.
Painting with the liquid acrylic was the least time consuming, most straightforward part to the entire project! It only took up about eight minutes, but it was fun. I love when colors come together to make new colors, so blotting the blue and magenta together to get the pretty purple was fascinating to me. Removing the stencil pieces was also easy, but did become a tad more difficult as the acrylic dried. But after everything else, I was not about to give up.
After a long hour and nineteen minutes, the canvas was complete! I may try this one again with a more simple design without much in the way of teeny tiny pieces, but it’ll be a few days before I build up the courage to get that stencil vinyl back out. It has been thrown under my desk for time out and will not be allowed out until it has thought hard about what it did wrong and what it can do to be a better vinyl next time.
