Valentine's Artwork

I wanted to make something for my husband for Valentine's Day this year, and with tons of Pinterest ideas floating around, the hardest part was picking one. Have you seen the heart-shaped 'Love' in wooden letters on canvas? That's what I landed on.

Above is my completed project.

I got frustrated at Hobby Lobby because the selection of wooden letters was pretty slim in terms of letter size, font, and even the letters I needed. I wanted to incorporate four words from our wedding vows, taken from I Corinthians 13:7.

At the height of my frustration at what seemed like a failed Plan A, in walks my brilliant friend who happened to be shopping at the same time! She suggested I look at chipboard letters a couple aisles over. Did I mention she's brilliant? I was able to get all I needed between a multi-pack of letters and one set of larger letters sold as a single-alphabet pack. Also purchased: a 20x20 inch canvas and white acrylic paint. I had satin varnish and glue at home.

Once home I punched out the letters I needed and played with various layouts as seen here. You can see in some of the pictures my freehand heart template I lightly penciled onto the canvas to guide me.

This last one is the layout I decided to go with. To make it easier to choose which layout I liked best, these pictures helped a lot. As you can see, the multi-pack of letters I bought came in different colors. I had to go with a few non-white letters, but since I'd be painting them, I thought it would be fine.

I used wood glue to stick the letters to the canvas only because I couldn't find my Elmer's glue! So I'm sure regular old glue would work great. As I started putting the letters in place with glue, I'd draw light guidelines on the canvas with pencil so I remembered where to start and end. The glue got a little tricky because it liked to ooze out from under the letters. I had a paper towel handy to wipe up oozes.

After everything was glued, I painted at least two if not three coats of white acrylic paint to everything - canvas and letters - making sure to get the sides of the letters covered too. Like the oozing glue, painting the letters proved a little tricky with paint globs that liked to pool up in the crevices of the letters. I just used my foam brush to even out the paint as well as I could.

The colored letters got another coat or two of paint until I couldn't see anymore color. Then as a finishing touch I used some satin varnish on the letters so they'd stand out shiny against a matte canvas.

And that was it! It took some time, especially waiting on paint to dry, but it was a pretty easy project.

my very own bleach pen shirt

My first creation from Pinterest inspiration, the bleach pen shirt. Here's the original:

And here's my spin on it (check out its two-sided-ness!)...


One thing I did differently that worked great was I used my disappearing ink pen to draw the design. I can't find my pen at the moment to see who makes it, but it's a two-sided pen - one side has blue ink that comes off with water. The other side has purple ink that gradually disappears over time (it's air soluable!). I used the blue side to draw my design that I mostly followed when drawing with the bleach pen, but I did adlib some.

Here is the disappearing ink drawing:

I started with a couple concentric circles as guides, traced around random objects found in the room. These circles kept me centered on the side of my shirt (I wanted half the flower on front and half on back). The circles also kept my flower pretty round as I added petals.

And this is what it looked like with the bleach on the shirt. I put a section of newspaper inside my shirt with a piece of parchment paper on top of that before drawing with bleach. After drawing with the bleach pen, I watched it until it got to a pink color that I liked. Oh, you can see the disappearing pen in this picture.

And here you see the shirt a little more opened up so you can see how the flower wraps from front to back. Ta da!

Oh, and you can see here three spots I added to the front of the shirt just below the flower...I was thinking at the time of something a friend told me a while back. She makes jewelry, and she always puts an intentional flaw in her designs like the Amish do when they make quilts. I'm not sure I love my intentional flaw on this shirt, but that's what I was going for when I did it.

This was a fun, quick project. Definitely worth doing again!