Sewing photos to make a Canvas & Fabric Photo Display...

Today, during the girls afternoon nap and this evening, I managed to get a little project I'd been meaning to do prior to Christmas completed. I am a little at a loss as to what I should call it so I settled on a 'canvas & fabric photo display'. Nothing like just describing it!

Again, much like the double layer twirl skirt, this project began as a mental image of a finished product in my mind but with no real direction as to how I would achieve the final look!

Here's a look at the finished project so that you know what I was working towards:

 The lens flare on the above photo totally wiped out my face (which, for the record, I don't really mind because I'm not that keen on having photo's of me on here) ... but in the interests of making the project look at least half decent - and with much internal umming and ahhing, to-ing and fro-ing, yessing and no-ing, I have buckled and included the next shot with me included... there done! Just don't expect to see my face gracing here again any time soon - it's just me and a weird secrecy/privacy thing I've got going on, kinda feeling a little intimidated by having my face out there (not that anyone probably really cares but) there's a quiet confidence that comes from being somewhat anonymous.

Oh and check out this fabric:

It is a 100% cotton canvas type decorator fabric and I just love the gold and black floral design... BUT what made me love it more was that it was marked down to $2 a meter (and its 145cm wide [57"]). I loved it so much that I bought a great big roll of the stuff (a few months ago now) and have had visions of having this fabric and colour scheme becoming a bit of a theme around the house with canvas' and cushions in the living room, drapes in the dining room and who knows what else. One thing is for sure - you will be sure to see this fabric popping up here and there in future posts - I have an ENORMOUS roll of the stuff to use!

Well enough talk, here's how I did it:

1. Choose canvas (mine was about $5 from the discount store) and apply two coats of spray paint to surface including the edges (I used gold -also bought at the discount store $3.50, to tie in with my fabric).



2. Decide how you want the fabric to lay - either horizontally or vertically; and how much of the painted canvas you want showing to determine the size of fabric strip you'll need (Remembering to allow for the fabric to have extra length to wrap around the sides to the back of the frame where you'll staple gun the fabric later). I wanted my fabric to run horizontally and to cover most of the canvas with the gold paint to serve more as a border. I also wanted to have a somewhat 'shabby' style with frayed fabric edges so I tore the fabric rather than cutting it.

Just a close up of my frayed attempt at 'shabby' style :P

This is how I wanted the fabric to lay - I was almost tempted to
 end the project here as I don't mind how it looks as is!

3. I played around a little with my photo editing program as I wanted the photos to have a little bit of an aged and colour faded look as I thought it would sit better with the fabric print. I did originally think I was going to do the photos in a sepia tone but it just lacked any 'pop' and kind of blended into the background a little too much whilst the full colour just seemed wrong. I printed off the photos, one with the word 'Peace' (this one went on Little Little Miss M's photo), 'Love' (on the photo of darling husband and I) and the word 'Happiness' (on Big Little Miss M's photo).

4. Now at this point I was still toying around with just how I was going to attach the photos to the fabric and canvas. My first thoughts were to use PVA glue in a kind of modge podge fashion but then after a little experiment with an extra photo print and fabric off cut I settled on actually sewing the photo onto the fabric. You'll need to play around with the photo placement and use a disappearing fabric pen to mark your final placement.

5. I did quite a few practice runs with a spare photo and fabric scrap. I tried out stitching with a sheet of baking paper over the photo to protect it - but discovered I didn't really need it, I just relaxed the presser foot by one setting. I tried a few different stitch styles - zig-zag, decorative and blanket stitch- but settled back with the zig-zag because sometimes less is more. I found it helped to just go slow with this step to ensure the photo was feeding through evenly, but otherwise this step was so easy that I'm positive I will do more projects with stitched photographs.





 6. Once you have sewn all your photo's in place its just a matter of using a staple gun to stretch and hold the fabric in place.

7. Now flip it back over, admire your craftiness and WOO HOO do a little victory dance!

Now I'm actually pretty impressed with how this turned out... I feel like craftiness is contagious because since I started on this blogging endeavour I really feel more inspired and creative than ever before.

Like it? Leave a comment, become a follower or pop back again soon to see what I'm up to... but whilst you're here check out some of my other sewing/crafting tutorials. I promise at some stage to make this blog a little more organised - perhaps with tabs to sort our 'sewing' from 'craft' and 'tutorials' - but bear with me I'm still learning to get my head around HTML code and also just how to do different things on this here blog of mine!