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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One of my favorite ways to introduce new crafters to cross stitch or embroidery is by having them make a bookmark. They’re useful even if they don’t turn out that pretty, and it’s a small enough project that it can be done pretty quickly, even if you don’t have a lot of stitching skills.

For little kids I love to have them start stitching on burlap because the holes are big and forgiving, and they can play with cross stitch or other kinds of embroidery all in one place. These are usually finished with duct tape on the back both to hide the stitching and knots and to seal in the edges so the fabric doesn’t unravel.

There are, of course, prettier methods for finishing a cross stitch bookmark, especially if you are working on Aida fabric. A common thing to do is to fold the fabric over on itself and then sewing down the edges. You can do the same thing with regular fabric or felt sewn on the back, but if you’ve planned to have extra cross stitch fabric on your project that makes it even easier.

If you need help making your cross stitch bookmarks pretty, check out this post with a tutorial from A Stitch of Blissfulness.

The post has plenty of photos to make it clear what you need to do. You can finish all the edges in the same way so that they are closed, or you can make fringe along the top and bottom of the bookmark by unraveling a little bit of the fabric on the ends. She shows how to do this too, and it’s a cute look though I don’t know that I would always do it this way.

If you like to stitch bookmarks, how do you finish them? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: A Stitch of Blissfulness.]

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