I have a deep appreciation for burlap and I have pined countless projects involving burlap. One of the projects I have seen over and over is an adorable picture of something burlap, with the description: "paint letters on burlap using Sharpies = super easy and super cute!" Well, just like my Sharpie on the Dollar Store mug fail, this was totally not as easy as you would think. First off, burlap is a rough material. Because of this, it makes it very difficult to draw on and fill in all the holes.
I started with a regular Sharpie marker which barely made a dent. I graduated to some IKEA water based paints that I stole out of my kid's craft supplies. The paint actually worked the best, but was still slow going. I used the last remains of a Sharpie paint pen, but when it ran out I gave up. I later purchased a Sharpie oil based paint pen to fill it in a little, but I never successfully found an easy option! Maybe my task was too large. I was going for that cool, subway art styled collage look that is so popular right now. Maybe one letter on a pillow case would have been easier...
What started as a regular printed picture in a frame, had long been replaced by a piece of material I found attractive.
I removed the material and replaced it with burlap, securing in place with Duct Tape along the outer edges (yes, the only color I had on hand was hot pink!)
I hesitated for a moment and considered leaving it like this, but decided not to be lazy and got the iron out to eliminate these wrinkles.
Since I planed on painting free-hand, me genius idea was to tape this piece of yarn across the picture as a guide. It worked pretty well! The other thing I did was type up a draft of what I wanted in a Pub document to refer to.
As you can see, I did a rough outline of everything first, then began the loooong process of filling everything in. Sit back and bunker down, this will take some time and may cause intense hand crampage.
Linked Up Here
Is it biased if I say this is AMAZINGLY cute!!!
ReplyDeleteThis is adorable! I'm glad you were honest about how much time it takes, because I'd love to do something like this but would probably put it off until the night before guests arrive. Then I'd have a meltdown!
ReplyDeleteI'd love if you'd come join my How To Tuesday link party, too.
http://housewifehowtos.com/link-party-2/how-to-tuesday-link-party-9/
This really is pretty awesome looking. Good job and kudos for sticking with it until the bitter end! I actually had a sharpie mug success. But failure would have only cost me a few minutes. :D
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