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Fabric Wrapped Letter

comments (2) January 14th, 2009 in gallery

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Jenn_at_FFP, member

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Fabric Wrapped Letters

Photo: Jennifer

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Items Needed
Old clothing or other clean fabric
Notions, buttons, rick rack, etc
Computer
Printer
Cardboard (shipping, pizza, soda cases, etc)
Scissors

Instructions
First, make a template for the letter. Either draw a letter free hand or open up a word processing or power point program and pick a font that you like. Keep in mind your going to wrap fabric strips around a cardboard cutout. You don't want a super thin letter but bolding a font you like may help. After you've settled on the letter and font, enlarge the font size and print. Full legal page size makes a nice over-sized letter. Font sized to 300 (which translates to about a 2 1/2"x 4" letter) will create a nice tree ornament.

Cut out your printed letter, trace it onto the cardboard and cut out. The thinner the letter font, the harder it is to cut loops and curly-q's so try a thinner cardboard or use a different font.

Finally, gather up some old CLEAN clothing or fabric remnants and cut into strips (about 1" wide but it doesn't have to be exact). Then you start at one end of the letter and start wrapping the fabric snugly around the cardboard slowly working your way around the entire surface. You will likely need more than one strip of fabric. You can either tie the next piece together or tuck it under and keep wrapping. At this point you can use different colors and patterned fabric to give it a unique and whimsical look. Solid colored cotton tshirts or fleece lend a more primitive feel. Try twisting the fabric on itself once or twice to keep the fabric taught at the points in letters (like M, W, N, etc). Finish by tucking the tail of the fabric under a wrapped row and snip off any excess.

Trim the fabric letter in bows, buttons, rick rack, miniature toys, anything in your sewing kit or leave as it. Use a loop of fishing line for an invisible hanger or a loop of fabric for an eclectic look.

Jenn's Tips: I found it easier to wrap the wider letter font with the fleece and the cotton Tshirt material. The blue rayon/polyester looks great with the narrow font and I like it with the tied off ends. I will trim off the stray fibers that frayed during the wrapping process and spray with a heavy starch to keep it neat. Easily convert this to a wall sized letter hanging by enlarging the stencil.