How to Resize a Stencil

While marking a quilt with a continuous line stencil, I realized I needed a 3" stencil for the border in addition to the 4" stencil I had just used for the body, so I made one using Paint Shop Pro. I traced two of the designs onto a sheet of paper with a black marker and scanned it into my computer.

The original 4" stencil is a little blurry.

Click on the Pen Tool.

The settings are: Drawing Mode, Point-to-Point, Solid Line, 10 pixels wide.

Black foreground, Invisible background

Blow up the image

Click on the beginning of the line. Click again on each portion of the curve. Click again on the end. For a straight line, click on the beginning and end points. The vector nodes can be moved to make a line perfectly straight.

Convert the vector line to a raster layer. Do this for each line section.

When your finished with the lines, make the background invisible.

Layers>Merge Visible

It should look something like this. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Edit>Copy

Edit>Paste>Paste as New Image

Image>Resize

Set the Width to any size. I needed a 3" template. You can make a stencil as wide as the printable area of a sheet of paper (8-11") or as narrow as 1". I wouldn't go any smaller.

Copy the image you just resized. Click on the original image and make all the layers invisible.

Edit>Paste>Paste As New Layer. You may now delete the invisible layers.

You may see that more than one design will fit onto a sheet of paper.

Layers>Duplicate. Duplicate this layer and you will have a copy of it on a new layer. Arrange this new layer so that it lines up with the other one.

Image>Mirror. You may have to mirror the image so it will line up.

Erase what you don't need. Repeat this process for other sizes. Simply resize the new stencil and paste it on top of the original image as before. You may copy and paste each layer as a new image and save them.

You should end up with this. I printed my stencil using Paint Shop Pro's Print Layout. You can print on paper or cardstock, but I prefer inkjet transparency film.

Perforating a stencil makes it easier to cut. I'm using a zig-zag stitch and a 90/14 needle without thread.