Burlap and Gingham Love

A few weeks ago, this great website called Paper Coterie had an open house.   Now, I am poor, but they were offering a free $40 coupon, so I took them up on it.  Their prices were so reasonable I was able to get two items for only the cost of shipping!  I got a gorgeous 20-page wedding photobook and a cute polaroid-inspired poster. Today's challenge was to find a pretty way to display this poster of my family!

 The cool surprise about this poster was that it was a STICKER!  Yes, that's right ladies and gents, it comes with instant mounting capabilities.  Buuuut since we live in an apartment, I had to find a more temporary display option.  So armed with a canvas, a glue gun, some burlap, and some gingham, I made a beautiful little mount for my beautiful little family.

Step 1: glue burlap to canvas.  This is harder than it looks if you are using thrifted burlap bags, because they wrinkle and stretch in many weird ways.  But after a half hour of wrestling and burned fingertips, I succeeded.

 

Step 2: stick poster on.  I was happy to find that the poster had a more fibrous, fabric-like feel to it than paper.  It allowed it to be flexible, and blend well with the burlap.  Just remember to start in the middle and smooth out to the edges when you are applying it, to avoid puckers and wrinkles!  Sorry, I forgot to take a picture here.

Step 3: attach some frou-frou.  There are plenty of fabric flower tutorials out there in the blogoshpere, but I went a little off the grid with this one.  I mostly just smashed up some gingham and threw a ton of hot glue in there.  That's how I made the "flowers," or whatever you would like to call them.  Then I made a little gingham fan, and with a mess of hot glue, attached it all to the canvas.  That's it.  3 easy steps.

 And here is the finished product: