Love Letter Tutorial by Elyse Major

M is for …

If you like letters-as-décor then this project is for U

By Elyse Major

Single letters and numerals made of unfinished wood or paper mache are available at craft stores. Try your hand at decorating one and you may soon find yourself moving onto full monograms and mottos. Use to spell-out MRS and/or MR as gifts to brides and grooms or decorate as table numbers to add charm to your celebration as easy as 1-2-3.

What you’ll need

Unfinished letter or number

Decoupage medium

Foam brush

Scissors

Scraps of fabric

Gather scraps of fabric and cut or snip-and-tear into strips; next trim again into smaller sizes.

Piece by piece begin to cover the letter on all visible sides by brushing light strokes of decoupage medium to it and affixing and gently smoothing the scraps in place.

Continue until the letter is covered.

Secure any loose pieces or corners with a little touch of glue.

If your letter is not furnished with grooves or hooks for hanging, suspend with a narrow strip of fabric, ribbon or twine tacked to the reverse.

Elyse Major is the author of Seaside Tinkered Treasures and Tinkered Treasures (CICO Books). Visit Elyse at tinkeredtreasures.com

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Lately I have been feeling like all of my clothes are looking a little worn or feeling a little tired. I don’t want to buy new clothes, though, so there’s been a lot of mending, altering and adding special touches to things that otherwise might get overlooked or not worn at all.

As an example, not too long ago I added a little bit of embroidery to a T-shirt, which was a lot of fun to do and made me start eyeing all my solid-colored garments and wondering how they might look with some stitching added.

Of course you can cross stitch on garments, too, whether T-shirts or woven tops, skirts, pants and more. But it can be tricky to transfer cross stitch designs to your garment to make stitching easier.

Much like with embroidery, it’s great to use a water soluble stabilizer to keep your fabric in place while you stitch and to transfer your design (or your cross stitch grid at least) while you’re stitching. Then you just wash away the stabilizer when you’re done and it will look like the stitching has always been there.

Ashley General Handmade uses Sulky Stick ‘n Stitch, which is a product I use, too. It’s easy to use and washes away cleanly.

To make it even easier, she designed some printable cross stitch grids at different counts that you can print out to draw your own cross stitch designs, but you can also print the grid right on the Sulky, so you can stitch on top of squares and then remove them when you’re done.

Brilliant, right?

She has pages as big as 8 count and all the way down to 20 (remember: the bigger the number the smaller the stitches will be) that you can download and print to make your own designs and also use to make stitching on clothing easier. I’m definitely going to try this the next time I want to cross stitch on fabric!

You can grab her printables over at Ashley General Handmade.

[Photo: Ashley General Handmade]

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