I love using my Silhouette CAMEO® to spruce up the decor in my home. My home is decorated in a farmhouse/flea-market style, and I love hunting for treasures at our local antique flea market every month. One of my favorite things to collect are chalkboards.

As much as I think I have decent handwriting, I needed a better solution for writing words on my chalkboards. Fortunately, my Silhouette machine gives me the extra help.

I have been making stencils for my chalkboards for a few months now, and the stencils help the chalkboards look so much better than if I were to handwrite the letters. I have even simplified the process so that I don’t even need to edit the letters. When I first started making stencils, I had to edit many of the letters because fonts don’t cut as stencils. You lose the centers of many letters, so I had to edit them and attach the centers so that they were part of my stencil. As you can see in this photo, the center parts of the letters B, A, O, and R are missing.

Then I discovered that I don’t even need to do that step. Because it’s easy to draw the letters just by looking at them!

Supplies Needed:

Step One: Create the Chalkboard Stencil

  1. Measure your chalkboard so you know how much space you have to work with. Select a font that fits with the words and size available on the chalkboard. I happen to have a lot of skinny chalkboards, so I like the Belacu font. You can also use any of the designs in the Silhouette Design Store to add to your stencil.
  2. Using Silhouette Studio®, lay out your design and size it to fit your chalkboard. 
  3. Be sure to select “Stencil Material” as your cutting material. If you are using the heavier Show-Offs stencil blanks, use the following settings: Blade – 10,  Speed – 5, Thickness – 33, and Passes – 2. The thicker stencil material is great because you can easily save your stencils and reuse them.
  4. Once you cut the stencil, tape it to your chalkboard. Using a liquid chalk marker (or regular chalk), fill in the letters. When drawing the “B”, as seen in the photo below, just draw in the letter as seen on your computer screen. 
  5. When you are finished, your chalkboards will look amazing! This trick works for anything you want to write for each season. 
This blog post was contributed the blog My 100 Year Old Home. It has been edited and republished with permission from the author.