Letter Stencil Generator

What a stencil needs that a font does not

Cut an ordinary letter O out of card and you get a ring and a disc, and the disc falls on the floor. Every letter with a hole (A, B, D, O, P, Q, R, and the digits 0, 4, 6, 8, 9) has the same problem. A stencil face solves it with bridges: narrow bars of uncut material that hold the counter to the rest of the sheet. The two stencil faces here, a classic and a bold, have those bridges drawn into the letters. The third face is a rounded sans with no bridges of its own, so the generator finds each enclosed counter and adds a bar either side of it before printing.

This is craft, not handwriting practice. The bubble letters page prints outlines for a child to trace and colour; this page prints something you cut with a knife.

Reading the sheet

Grey is the area that gets cut away. The black line is the cut line. The white bars across a letter are the bridges: leave them. A dashed frame around each stencil marks where to cut the sheet into individual cards, and the instructions at the top of the first page say the same thing in two sentences for whoever ends up holding the scissors.

Sizes and layout

One stencil per row gives the biggest letters the page allows, one to a page, for wall lettering and signs. Two per row is the everyday size for boxes and labels. Three and four are small enough for jars and folders. Every character in the box becomes its own stencil; spaces are skipped, so a name or a phrase comes out as a set.

Shapes

Star, heart, crescent moon, bat, ghost, circle, triangle, hexagon, diamond and arrow print as stencils after the letters, at the same size. They are drawn as plain outlines with no bridges because none of them encloses anything.

Cutting tips

Print on card or glue the paper to a cereal box. Cut on a board with a craft knife rather than scissors; scissors cannot turn inside a counter. Cut the small pieces first while the sheet is still stiff. For a stencil you will use more than once, laminate it or cut it from a plastic folder using the paper as a guide.