Stenciling a Denim Jacket Is An Easy Upcycled Clothing DIY Project Anyone Can Do!
At Cutting Edge Stencils, we believe stenciling a denim jacket is the easiest way to make a fashionable upcycled piece of clothing! Once you learn how to stencil on fabric, you won’t want to stop stenciling fabulous thrift store finds or continue giving much-needed makeovers to old pieces of clothing you can’t seem to get rid of! Painting a custom design denim jacket to fit your exact taste just got EASIER and more AFFORDABLE with Cutting Edge Stencil’s large variety of stencils!
Just like stenciling a wall, you are going to take blue painters’ tape and mask off any areas you don’t want paint on. Because we are using a large wall stencil, we chose to mask off each side of the largest section in the center of the back of the denim jacket.
Michael’s has a variety of fabric paint that’s perfect for stenciling on fabric! We focused on the brand Fabric Creations for this specific fabric stenciling craft project. We mixed 3 parts Fabric Cream Soda and 1 part Ganache for our basecoat color. Take a 2” dense foam roller for stenciling and roll on 2 coats of paint. Make sure each coat is dry before applying the next.
Once your fabric paint in completely dry, lay your toile stencil over the surface. PRO TIP: You can take an extra step and apply repositionable spray adhesive to the back of the wall stencil to reduce your chances of stencil seepage a.k.a. “bleed” from getting under the stencil if you want, but it’s not necessary.
Now take Fabric Creation’s Crimson and lightly roll over the stencil with a dense foam roller for stenciling. The denim jacket is not a perfectly flat surface, so take your hand and hold your stencil in place while rolling the fabric paint over each section of the jacket. After painting our stencil pattern, which only took 3 minutes, we came to realize that this brand of fabric paint dries quickly! We were able to reveal our gorgeous stenciled toile pattern right away!
Can you say OBSESSED?! The stenciled design brought life to my boring, plain denim jacket & I couldn’t find it in myself to stop there, so I decided to stencil some accents in the front as well!
The best part about stencils is that you can totally customize your DIY stencil project to whatever YOU LIKE! Our next step was stenciling the top right and left portion of that jacket where the shoulder and arms meet.
Repeat the same process by masking off the perimeter of the section you plan on stenciling. There tends to be more seams in the front of the denim jacket, but no fear, just take your foam roller for stenciling and push into the edges. Again, just make sure the masked off area is sticking to the jacket and you’ll have nothing to worry about!
When it came to painting a denim jacket with a wall stencil, The Secret Garden Toile Stencil was the perfect stencil for the job. This stunning stencil pattern has beautiful individual details that are perfect for singling out when stenciling smaller spaces, just like the front two areas of the denim jacket. I chose to stencil two “scenes” with people in them. One with a temple and the other with a botanical portion of the stencil.
An important question DIY’ers ask is how to protect the stenciled fabric from outdoor conditions and the wash. Simple! It’s called heat setting. On a low heat setting, slowly iron your fully dried stenciled fabric through a piece of thin cotton cloth for about 30 seconds. This process will permanently set the paint and add durability.
- Check out Cutting Edge Stencils Facebook Page to see beautiful customer photos and interact with the people who created them!
- Follow us on Instagram and Pinterest and share your designs using the #cuttingedgestencils. We love seeing your projects!
Thanks for reading and happy stenciling!
Erika Lee and the Cutting Edge Stencils Crew