Stencil 101 Decor March Give-away!

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With all the snow (and slush!) here in NY, I think it’s high time for some cheering up! To lighten your mood and keep money in your pocket,  I am giving away a copy of Stencil 101 Decor! Hmm, what shall the contest be?  I’d love to see some creative comments so how about tell me your favorite stencil image from the Stencil1 shop and why you like it so much and I tell ya what I’m gonna do, I’ll send you that stencil along with the Stencil 101 Decor book!  So for example, “I like the Ranchero because I like the cars that go boom”. You get the idea, so let’s hear it!

Spring Cleaning!

STENCIL STUFFED ANNIE

The other day, Stencil1 got a head start on a little studio spring-cleaning. There are a couple major projects down the pipeline, so before we really get our hands dirty, we needed an organized space ripe for productivity (i.e., Ed had a bunch of stuff he needed to get rid of).

It was such a funny process, the mini trial that was conducted for each object. Ed, the prosecutor, me the jury. Each item was scrutinized for monetary value or sentimental worth. There was a selection of velvet rock posters from his brother’s bedroom, paperweights, lead type, battery-powered motors, maps, records, and books. I can’t remember it all. It reminded me of that birthday game. No, not hot potato or musical chairs or throw the socks in the laundry basket. Though, I think that last one was played only at our house. This is how it went: the birthday girl’s mother would come out with a tray of things covered by a dishtowel. She’d unveil the tray for about thirty seconds, during which time you studied it and committed its contents to memory. Then you furiously wrote everything down. I once won at Erinn Lynch’s birthday party and my prize, you ask? A fever meter! Remember those? An hourglass looking glass cylinder that was filled with colored liquid. When you held one end of it, the heat from your hand would propel the liquid to the other side. I remember thinking it was so cool.

Once we’re finished cleaning, we’ll be announcing our new projects. Stay tuned!

Going Dutch!

We got some Dutch press y’all! Check out our stencils put to great use in creating up-cycled plates. That’s right, don’t renovate DECORATE. Genius! You can learn how to make these plates in our book Stencil 201, Get it!

Paint it Black

The other day I headed off to do another room at at the Ace Hotel. My friend Charles assisted me while simultaneously working on my new website’s redesign. I also asked another friend Tami,who does indie PR for me, to meet up. There we all were, full of Stumptown coffee and in Room 1105. I forgot this was one of the smaller rooms but we all found our place, Tami and Chaz in the bunk beds (yes) and me doing my thing. The wall was already painted a chalkboard matte black and so I decided to do a black gloss stencil pattern on top of this. This pattern, Birds on wires, is actually in my new book, Stencil 101 Decor. I cheated a little and had the pattern cut larger so I could work faster but the way I executed this was the same as you would with the standard sized stencil in the book. I started top left, and using the registration marks on the stencil, I created a grid on the wall using blue tape and a pencil. This went fairly fast and I worked around a door on the wall and a tv mounted as well! The reason I made the registration marks on the wall was so I wouldn’t have to paint in order. This is done so you don’t overlap your stencil on top of a wet area you just painted.  I painted the stencil with a dense foam roller, my favorite. Then there was a knock at the door. I opened the door to see this super cute gal named Valentine. She works for the Ace, blogging and holds the title “hunter/gatherer” (yes!). She took some pics and later a gentleman by the name of Jeremy visited to take more pics. We got to chatting design, and turns out he is a designer/art director for the hotel and did a vast amount of the signage and custom work I drool over  all around the hotel. I’ve mentioned this before but the attention to detail in the hotel design is just so clever. If you are a typography nut, there’s a lot to admire. They blogged about the progress on the Ace Blog. I digress… So I bounced around the wall, bent the stencil around some areas, until I covered the whole thing! The black on black gave this dramatic vintage wallpaper effect and I highly recommend it.  The photos show more contrast than in real life, it’s a subtle effect. I am dying to do more of this tone on tone effect with colors and white.  We finished the evening by me first asking Tami to hold the bunk bed ladder and walk on my back, then we walked down to Veselka for a nice warm, Polish dinner. Best Borscht in NYC!  Quite a New York day!

ReadyMade says "Stencils are back!"

The new February/March issue of ReadyMade does not disappoint. No, not because they wrote up our new book Stencil 101 Decor, well not only because of that! The issue seems to have a lot of super thought-out diy graphics this issue, totally pulling me in to each article. The table of contents has these great handmade looking wood numbers for the page reference, there are great articles on the Ace Hotel(where I currently do art for rooms!), a great pancake article(yum!), and a guide to escapism, what we all need in the winter! I don’t know, you’ll see, there is a difference, an effort in this issue. So ReadyMade declares Stencils are back and I declare ReadyMade is back, fantastic issue!

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