Yay! I’m so excited to finally put a project on my blog! I’ve been wanting to but I’ve been so busy with my little stinker (and my big stinker too if you count Joel) that I have had to wait. The only problem is that it is not a sewing project. Awkward. But it is a fabric project (I say “project” instead of “craft” because I can’t do crafts due to my lack of artistic ability and I can’t stand when things are not symmetrical). There may be a touch of OCD involved.
I found this fabric above online one day by Amy Butler. I often find fabrics I like but I never end up buying them because I never have a specific purpose for them and don’t want to be one of those ladies with yards and yards of fabric in their basement that is never used (you know who you are). So when I saw this fabric, I for once loved it enough to buy it without a plan. It’s such a big damask print that I wanted to display it somehow, because it makes me happy just to look at it! To me, that’s what art should do.
On with the project… I decided to make a wall hanging with the fabric.
Here’s how to do it:
You need two pairs of wooden stretcher bars. That’s their real name for any other non-artists, and I found them at Michael’s in the canvas isle. I bought two 20″ and two 30″, because that fit my print the best. I’m gonna be doing another one that’s 36″ x 48″ soon. I just found out that Ikea sells fabric in large prints that would be perfect. You can check them out at Ikea.com. You also need a saw tooth picture hanger and your fabric, of course! My fabric was 100% cotton, but something like a lightweight canvas would work great too.
Assembling the stretcher bars into a frame is easy. They just interlock at the corners.
You can secure the bars with a couple finishing nails in each corner or use a heavy-duty staple gun in each corner.
Next, cut your fabric about two inches wider than the frame to give room to wrap it around the back of the frame. A little extra is better than a little bit small because you can always trim the excess later.
Position your frame over the wrong side of the fabric, and begin to staple the fabric to the backside of the frame with a medium or heavy duty staple gun. It works best to staple one spot on one side and then staple the exact opposite side, and then continuing that way around the frame so it all stretches equally. Make sure to stretch your fabric tightly as you staple it or it will not hang nicely.
When get to the corners, which should be the last to be stapled, fold them like you would with wrapping paper. If you do it so the that folded part is on the top and bottom of the frame rather than the sides, it will be less likely to show when it is on the wall.
Trim the excess fabric on the back if you need to, and finish it off with a saw tooth picture hanger which can be attached using small finishing nails. Voila! That’s it! I think for my next one I’ll serge the edges of the fabric first but I wasn’t quite sure how much fabric I would need to wrap around the back of the frame so I ended up applying fray-check to the edges, although it’s probably not necessary.
