hey Jennifer priests here and today I'm going to share with you how to use your Eclipse to to make stencils for terracotta pots so here I have one of the designs from the Sizzix t-shaped store and I just put that into the software and you can see the library there on the right hand side you can pull you can browse and then pull shapes in from that library to cut in your a shape store so I just picked this kind of little folk type of image to put onto one of my pots and then I resize it so it was about six inches tall because these are big terracotta pots so I wanted it to fit next I typed the word garden in Spanish using a font called bark 1801 and if you click on the little I button it is for the info cards it will take you to a blog post that shows you how to do all of that and it has the link to the font and everything so that you can go download it it's a great font for doing stenciling and basically I used those text the controls in the text tool box over there on the right hand side so that I could change the spacing between the letters and then in the paths button I merged everything together so that it wouldn't be like a bunch of little pieces next I loaded my mat into the machine chose vinyl for the type of material and then click the top button to go ahead and cut that in this is eclipsed too so you can see this is this Eclipse to working it cuts really nice and fast once your stencils are cut you're going to trim any extra vinyl from the edges with some scissors leave a little bit of an edge around your vinyl image so that you can have that little bit of a border because we are stenciling with it now you're going to carefully remove your vinyl stencil from the backing and then lay it onto your pot now because the pot is curved both horizontally and vertically you are on to or it's curved on two planes it's going to be really hard to get it to lay flat so you're going to kind of have to monkey with it a little bit like I did here and really press it down you can see they're similar to raised bubble edges um at the edges of the vinyl and what you're going to want to do is take your stencil brush or central's stencil sponge like I'm using here and keep it perpendicular or straight up and down from the area that you're stenciling that way you won't get very much paint going underneath those little bubbles like you can see on the top of the a there's a real big bubble right there once you're done peel off all of that vinyl and throw that out and then you can seal it with the spray sealer now here I'm going to show you how to do the design on a terracotta pot these are a really old terra cotta pot so you don't have to you don't have to worry about oh if it's new or old or whatever and in fact the older ones are a little bit easier to deal with because they have some dirt on them which makes it so the stencils less sticky so it's a little bit easier to use with the steps so the design is a little bit harder to do you could use a transfer tape to do this um but I didn't use a transfer tape because I was worried about bending the earth tearing and stretching the stencil so once you have your stencil in place you're going to use some paint you can use stencil paint acrylic paint chalk paint whatever you want to stencil the image through the vinyl and then once again once you're done you'll peel away the vinyl and you're going to use some tweezers to pull the extra out you can see I left a little piece of vinyl on that terracotta pot I didn't even see that till is making the video um so this is a nice way to kind of dress up your pots give them a little bit more of a customized look without spending any money and it actually looks really good on old weathered pot I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial please click the link up there in the info card so that you can get over to the Sizzix blog and see more information about all the tools that I used to make this as well as leave a comment and see all the other fun stuff that Sizzix has to offer thanks so much for watching please hit that subscribe button and over here on the back panel if you click any of the little highlighted boxes it will take you to different tutorials for all kinds of different stuff that we've done here at Jes GDP and hydrangea oh thanks for tuning in I