Connectors and Making a Stencil

Yesterday, I shared the above card with everyone and a couple of people asked me what I meant about connectors and removing connectors in order to make the card. Therefore, I decided to provide you with the process that I used to make the above card. In other words, how to make a stencil.

For a stencil to work, each letter (or part of an image) cannot make a complete loop or circle. In other words, there must be a break in line for it to work.

Below is the word "Believe" in a basic font. As you can see, the "B" and the "E"s are complete loops--i.e., there are no breaks or separations as there are in the other letters.

If I were to cut out the letters as they exactly are, I would end up with this:

There are times when I would use the above--especially if I am using a beautiful liner paper with a pattern that I would like to showcase. The extra space in the letters "B" and "E" would provide more open space to view the paper.

Yet, this isn't the idea that I wanted for this particular project. So, to be able to get a stencil effect, I needed to "break the loop" that connected all parts of the "B" and the "E." To do this, I simply used white out to break the upper stem of the downstroke where it connected to the "B" and the return on the "E" where it connected to itself.

After the first trial, you can see that I didn't quite make a complete stencil. I didn't realize at the time that I needed to also separate the bottom on the downstroke where it connected to the bottom of the "B." Below is the final illustration that was used to cut. The arrows indicate where the connectors were removed to make the stencil used for the card.

I hope that this helps clarify the concept of removing connectors. In a future post, I might be able to explain the process of adding connectors or removing islands.