CHA 2015: Stencil Trend going strong with The Crafter’s Workshop

Stencils remain a favorite product of manufacturers and consumers – including myself! What I love about stencils is that they:

• give me a creative use for all my color mediums
• add anything from background design to texture
• are fairly inexpensive and take up almost no space
• are wonderful on everything from cards to scrapbooks to mixed media and into home décor.

Long lasting, easy to clean, and way cheaper than a stamp of this size – it’s easy to see why they’ve become so very popular. There is one company that stands out as the original innovator of bringing in artists to design signature stencil lines, a company that really was first to bring stencils out of “something cutesy to do on your wall with paint” and into the paper crafting industry.

The Crafter’s Workshop.

All their designs are 6×6 (the size I most often use and my preferred stencil size), and also available 12×12. I find the larger size to be too big in most cases for my projects even when working on layouts – but that’s just my own personal design preference. I do have several of their stencils in a larger size because the format and scale worked better for me. At this show they did not disappoint – especially with fantastic designs from Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and Rebekah Meier – artists who really help them to stand out from all others.

Because it is the artists themselves who are designing these they tend to be so very useful, and wonderful designs.

In addition to their traditional stencils they also have new smaller offerings too. I like these a lot – some I will simply need!

These six are Rebekah Meier’s, and below you can see Julie’s “Balzer bits”.

Julie had some fantastic sample layouts in addition to her products.

What I especially like about these two artists in particular and TCW in general is that the styles are wildly different, and yet equally useful for any type of project imaginable.

I believe this stencil (not branded with any designer name) is the work of TCW’s owner – a fantastic lady and designer as well! I really love that circle and the patterns with this. So fun.

Here are some of Rebekah’s stencils. She also has (with another brand) a fabric elements line… sadly I couldn’t get anyone to help me at that booth so I don’t have more information. Back to stencils! This one has ideas just brewing away for me…

Most especially what it has me thinking is that we will see more global architecture, color, pattern, and motifs in general showing up as a future trend. I love that!

I believe I left the booth wanting about 30 of the new designs – so many to love! The good news is, these are all shipping right away so there won’t be much waiting to do! There are loads of lovely stencils out there from other companies as well – you’ll hear more about them in other posts. It just makes me so happy to see the company that first hooked me on stencils and showed the industry how cool they could be doing so well still, and releasing so many great designs.