Why this site exists

The actual origin story

My eldest is the artistic one in our house. Crafts are their favourite thing in the world, and they go through materials at a rate that would alarm most accountants. Stencils came into it because they let you make something that looks properly finished without needing to draw it freehand first — which, when you are small and impatient and want it done now, matters enormously.

In practice two sections of this site get all the use. The letters, because everything ends up with a name on it — friends' names, the dog's name, occasionally objects that did not previously have names. And the animals, which come out when the job is making something rather than labelling it. Between them they have had more use than everything else on the site combined, and they are also the two categories I have redrawn most often, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.

So I went looking for printable stencils. And what I found was, frankly, a bit grim.

Sites that wanted an email address first. Sites where the download button was surrounded by four adverts and you had to guess which one was real. Sites promising "500+ designs" that had about forty, half of them broken links. Sites where the file, when it finally arrived, was a low-resolution JPEG that printed like a photocopy of a photocopy.

None of that is complicated to fix. It just requires someone to decide not to do it. So I built this instead.

What that meant in practice

Every decision on this site comes back to that brief.

No sign-ups, ever. No email wall, no account, no "just verify your address to unlock". You click the button and the file downloads. That is the entire transaction.

Proper file formats. Everything is a real vector file — an SVG that scales to any size without going fuzzy, and a PDF laid out for A4 that prints correctly on any printer. Not a screenshot of a stencil. An actual stencil.

Designs that work as stencils. This is the bit most free sites get wrong. A stencil needs bridges — the little connecting strips that stop the middle of an O falling out when you cut it. Every design here is drawn with those built in and tested before it goes up. Our design process page goes through how that works, if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Honest counts. There are 243 designs on this site. Not "500+". Not "thousands". Two hundred and forty-three, which I can count, because I know exactly what is here.

Who I am, roughly

I am a parent in Northern Ireland who builds websites, not a professional artist or a lifelong crafter. I want to be straightforward about that rather than pretend I have been hand-cutting Mylar since childhood.

What I do have is a resident critic who tests everything ruthlessly, a reasonable eye for when a design looks wrong, and enough stubbornness to redraw something until it does not. That critic is harsher than any client I have ever had. The dog on this site went through three versions before it was allowed to stay, because the first two — in an assessment delivered with the withering honesty only a child can manage — did not look like a dog.

And they were right. It did not. The current one is a labrador's head, and it exists in that form entirely because someone in this house refused to accept the first attempt.

The stuff I've got wrong

Since I am asking you to trust the site, it seems only fair to admit that early on this site claimed to have far more designs than it did, and mentioned PDF downloads that did not exist yet. Not deliberate deception — the usual thing where you write the marketing copy for the site you intend to build rather than the one you have.

It has all been fixed. The counts are real, the PDFs exist for every design, and the guides say what actually works rather than what sounds good. If you spot anything else that is wrong, tell me — I would genuinely rather know.

How it makes any money

Reasonable question, since everything is free.

Three ways, and none of them costs you anything. There are adverts on the pages, which pay for hosting. There are a few affiliate links to craft supplies in the guides — if you buy a brush through one, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you, and those are always labelled. And there are commercial licences and design bundles for people who want to sell what they make, which is the only genuinely paid thing here.

The free library stays free regardless. That was the whole point of building it.

If you actually use this

Then it has done its job, and I am glad. If you make something good, I would honestly love to see it — email me. And if you find a broken link, a design that will not cut properly, or a guide that gives duff advice, tell me that too. The site gets better mostly because people point out where it is not.