Today I'm sharing this cute little piece of DIY Monogram Wall Art that I made for my daughter's dorm room. It just took a few supplies and a little bit of time to make an affordable custom piece to hang over her bed.
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On move-in day, the goal was to get her in and set up with the basics. We had some decor pieces that she had selected, but once we got everything in place I thought it would be nice to add something over her bed.
I considered ordering her a custom monogram cut out piece, but wanted it faster than waiting to order and knew I could probably save a little money and put something together myself. I had seen wood cut out letters readily available at the craft store, so I found some at Hobby Lobby that had a variety of sizes and would allow me to do a larger letter in the center with smaller on the sides. I bought the largest ones I could that looked right together and planned to mount them on a canvas.
I wanted to dress up the edges of the canvas a bit and thought using circles glued to the edge from behind would make a cute scalloped edge effect. Surprisingly, HL didn't have basic wood circle cutouts in bulk (other than very small ones, I was looking for something about the size of a can lid). I did however find some other options that I considered. I thought I could cut these in half and glue them along the back edge. The oval pieces might have made an interesting design, and I found the unfinished ornaments that were about the size I was looking for with the Christmas crafts and thought I could also cut those in half and cut off the caps to create a scalloped edge.
In the end, all of those parts and pieces were getting more complicated (and expensive) than I wanted for this project so I opted for a wood bead garland to use as a border around the edge of the canvas. She wanted some natural woods and textures in her room, so I planned to leave the letters and wood garland unfinished on the white background. I used an 18x24" canvas, the side letters were 9.5", and the center letter was 13". With this style of letters they barely hung over the edge of the canvas so I slightly trimmed the serifs(?) on the left sides of the E and F. It was just enough to allow me to space them nicely on the canvas. I could have bumped up to a larger canvas but had this one on hand so was trying to make it work...
9.5" wood letter here or here || 13" wood letter here or here || 18x24 canvas here || Wood Bead garland here or here (just remove the tassels)
To begin, I spaced all the letters out and centered them, then used a pencil along a few of their edges to mark their place.
I kept the wood beads as even as possible with the front of the canvas, they covered up the staples too!
The corners were a bit tricky. I glued the last bead on each edge down securely, gave the beads some slack and then turned the garland around the corner and glued the first bead on that side down as close as possible to the last bead on the previous side. After the first bead on the new edge was secure I continued on little by little tightening up the row of beads along the string.
Upon approaching the corner where the two ends needed to meet, I laid them out first to determine what the last bead would be. Then I glued up close to that point, leaving the last bead free.
The string needs to be trimmed at this point, but first squirt some glue down into the hole to secure the bead in place and keep the string from coming loose. It also helped to squeeze a little dot of glue and actually glue that last bead to the one before it and the one under it since there was no canvas underneath it. Then, trim the string and glue the last bead to match up to the first bead. Thankfully, it came out pretty even for me!
That's it! This is also a great project for the dorm because it's really light and easy to hang with command strips or whatever the dorm will allow.
Now, you can certainly paint your letters, garland, and even canvas before you start assembling everything if you are wanting a particular color scheme. That would make it SO cute, too! I couldn't leave well enough alone on hers and draped a cute felt garland (from Hobby Lobby's Summer collection, so gone now- sorry!) across the top.
For a full tour of her dorm space and all other sources, click here!
Looks great! And a touch of color! Lol. I wish I had just a smidge of your creative talent.
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Pat
Thank you Pat. :) It was a fun project to do for her!
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