Text stencils never get old and are very versatile. You can use them in all sorts of DIY and craft projects, such as:
- handmade painted wooden signs
- custom t-shirts
- painted floor and wall tiles
- painted pillows
- cookies and cake decoration
- silk screen printing
- etching
Text stencils are a great way to use a design over and over again. However, designing stencils with other fonts than stencil fonts is a tedious manual process. It can be confusing!
In this article, we will show you an easy way to make text stencils with any font. But first, let us show you the manual and hard way. If you want to jump right to the easy-way, feel free to use the links below.
Table of contents
Challenge in Designing Text Stencils
Designing text stencils can be a tedious and confusing endehavor. The main reason? We need to make sure that the design includes all the necessary bridges.
A bridge is a part of a stencil's design that connects floating elements to keep them attached to the rest of the stencil. The bridges maintain and improve the structural integrity of a stencil.
As you can see from the image below, the upper row text does not include bridges. Therefore, the inner parts of the letters A, B and D are gone when the stencil is cut. The bottom row shows the stencil with bridges, connecting the inner material to the rest of the stencil.
Text Stencils With Any Font - The Hard Way
When we use a regular font (i.e. other font than a stencil font), we need to create the stencil bridges by ourselves. Usually, this is a manual process.
To give you two examples, you can check:
- How to make a stencil font with Cricut, presenting 22 steps to make text stencil bridges
- The video below.
Both are Cricut Design Space tutorials, but the same concept applies to other vector design software.
Text Stencils With Any Font - The Easy Way
Now, let's make our text stencils the easy way!
To do so, you just need one of our free tools:
Step 1 – Create
It is really easy to create a text stencil with the Text Stencil Generator.
Write your text and select the font you want. That's it!
The generator will automatically create the stencil bridges for you.
Step 2 – Download
With the text stencil ready with the font you selected, click the "Download" button.
You will get a SVG file, compatible with the majority of cutters.
The download will start automatically. If not, you can save the image that appears in the download box, or you can click "Save Image".
Step 3 – Cut
The text stencil SVG file is ready to cut! From here you can:
- print and cut the stencil manually
- use a cutter machine, such as Cricut, Silhouette, or Glowforge
- mix it with other designs to create a more elaborated stencil.
Have fun!
