How to stencil clothes with adhesive plastic film and paint

Let me introduce Mr Hurley. Mr Hurley, his brother (Mr Hurley) and his dad (Mr Hurley) love wearing HURLEY brand surfwear. With so many Hurleys in the family this can get expensive. I decided to modify the original Hurley logo and do some stencils on clothes.

I have seen tutorials using freezer paper, but I didn't have any to hand, so I substituted clear 'Contact', which is the inexpensive, adhesive plastic film used to cover school books. It is best to use clear Contact for ease of tracing your design, but it's a bit hard to see in some of the pictures.

To start with I designed my stencil on the computer. I used Microsoft Word and the 'Hurley' is written in Century Gothic font. I printed it out and made a couple of modifications by hand so it looked like this:

Then I placed the clear contact over the printout and cut out the letters with a scalpel.

Any middle bits of letters (like the 'e') need to be saved to be stuck on the fabric later.

I then carefully peeled the Contact from its backing and stuck it to the fabric. I used a paintbrush and acrylic paint to fill in the cut outs. You could also used fabric paint of course. The consistency of acrylic paint works fine for this and didn't produce any bleeding. I would recommend at least three coats allowing paint to dry in between.

I reused the same stencil to make this t-shirt.

Mr Hurley jumping for joy!