Printing with the Cat Mola Stencil

So happy to see some new followers! Thanks for your support and hope you are enjoying and learning from my posts on surface design.

I spent most of the day yesterday in the studio testing out the print blocks and stencils and trying out a few new ideas. Not everything went according to plan...but that's how it is when you're trying something new. It's often when you are trying so hard to get one thing to work (that isn't) that you suddenly discover another way. I had a bit of that happen yesterday and will get into the results tomorrow.

For today, I wanted to show you the results of the cat mola stencil. Although it looks similar to the cat mola mask I had as the first photo of the last post, there is a difference between the two.

The mask--made out of freezer paper-- is ironed directly onto the fabric. That means you can have as many little details as you can cut out of the freezer paper and iron on. The mask is pretty much a one shot deal. If you have few little bits to move, you may be able to get one or two more prints out of it but the more detailed, the more difficult that is to do.

The stencil, also made of freezer paper (doubled), has small bridges that link the little parts together. These remarkably sturdy stencils can be picked up and moved around because all the parts are one unit. You can use them over and over and in fact, the dried fabric paint seems to make them even stronger.

I decided to use multiple colors for the cat mola stencil. Because of the details, I used stencil brushes rather than a foam dauber. I put small amounts of the Opaque Pebeo Setacolor fabric paint on plastic lids and only picked up a little at a time to apply to the stencil.

I actually did two very similar prints. One is at the top of this post and the other is here.

My friend, Carolyn Brougham commented the other day that she thought she recognized the cat mola designs. The original mola was purchased on a trip with Carolyn to visit her parents who were living in Bogota, Columbia at the time. I have a lot of great and interesting memories of that visit as that was my first real trip  to a foreign country.