Someday Crafts: interfacing

Friday, May 24, 2013

Faux Canvas Wall Art

Remember the Silhouette Promotion going on? For their current promotion, Silhouette sent me some of their fabric interfacing to try out, and it's pretty nifty stuff!

I chose to use the Clean Cut Heat Transfer Fabric Interfacing because, well, I try to avoid pulling out my gigantic sewing machine.

I made this wall art a few weeks ago, but I didn't think it was quite finished. I wanted to add something to the grey tiles, but I wasn't sure what.

These faux canvas tiles were really, really, insanely easy to make. I'll give you a quick run through.

Here's what you'll need to make them:

-2 coordinating fabrics (remnants from Joann's that I'm in love with)

-Scissors

-Stapler and lots of staples

-Styrofoam squares (from the dollar store)

Cut your fabric to size - which is about 4 inches bigger than your Styrofoam. My Styrofoam squares were 12"x12" and fairly thin (less than an inch), so I made my fabric a 16"x16" square. If your Styrofoam is thicker, you may need to cut your square larger so that you have about 1.5"-2" around the back. Lay your Styrofoam in the middle of your fabric square and then wrap it up over the back of the square and use your stapler to staple the fabric to the Styrofoam. Do that on all 4 sides, but don't get too close to the edges.

I found that the easiest way to do the corners was too, 1) pull in the corner of the fabric and staple it; 2) Fold up the rest of one of the edges and staple it; 3) Fold up the other edge of the fabric and staple it too. It can get a little bulky, but I liked the look of this corner better.

Also, I'm not sure if it was just my stapler, but it can get a little hard to get the staples to go through the fabric and the Styrofoam. I went through a full stapler and a half's worth of staples! Just be prepared for a little frustration.

I put the images on the fabric in a backwards way. If I had known what I was going to do with the gray tiles, I would have put the images on them first. But I didn't, so I put them on after the fabric was already on the Styrofoam.

So here's a quick rundown of how to use the fabric interfacing with your Silhouette.

First of all, cut your fabric out to the size you need. I just cut mine to be about the size of my cutting mat.

Then you'll need to cut a piece of the interfacing just a little bit bigger than your fabric. The packaging recommends an inch bigger than your fabric.

When you iron your fabric to the interfacing, you want to make sure the fabric and the textured side of the interfacing are together.

Iron the fabric to the interfacing, making sure to apply plenty of pressure. I'd also recommend not touching the iron to the extra interfacing hanging out. Once it's ironed, cut off the excess interfacing.

Then you'll want to carefully peel off the backing of the interfacing.

Put it on your cutting mat, and then send it through your Silhouette.

After cutting your images, just peel it off the cutting mat and separate your cut image from the extra fabric. There were a few spots that weren't cut all the way through, but it was easy enough to use my scissors in those spots.

Because my fabric was already on my Styrofoam, I decided to just *try* ironing on the images while the fabric was on the Styrofoam. It worked like a charm! I didn't push too hard, but the interfacing had not problems adhering to the fabric. And the Styrofoam wasn't affected at all.

I used some blue poster tack to put them up in our downstairs bathroom. They're really light, so they don't need much to hold them up. I was originally planning to use the Command Velcro strips, but I didn't have enough and I didn't feel like spending money on more.