Woohoo--I got crafty this weekend! Okay, crafty in a home decor sort of way. :-) When I was at CHA, I loved watching Susan Luke of Second Chances by Susan create beautiful art with Hot Ribbon and her HUGE CQ--creativity quotient. She made a monogram framed wall hanging that I loved, and it was so simple. So I came home feeling totally inspired to pull the Hot Ribbon out and play.
First I made a pattern using a couple of fonts that I'd recently purchased, and I put it under tempered glass so that I could do all of the actual work directly on the glass, then peel it up when I was finished and iron it onto my white muslin background. I will attach a pattern here, BUT I have changed a couple of things on it that did not work well for me. That "L" looping through the lowercase "o" looked odd and had to be trimmed off. The "e" touching the ascender of the "k" wasn't one of my better ideas either. It meant that both of those words had to be picked up together. (That was a bit of a pain.) So my new pattern does not have the words intertwined so much. I chose a different font for the word "here" as well. Those little curlicues were awful to make! Here's the pattern: Download Love Spoken Here 2 (.psd file) OR View this photo (.jpg file).
What you need are these items: two packages of Black Hot Ribbon (1/8" wide iron-on ribbon), sharp scissors, an iron (the Clover iron is great for this--small, light, and easy to control), a pattern, and a tempered glass surface to initially adhere your ribbon to. Above you can see that I finished the first word. It was the easiest, because it was the largest. To get widths greater than 1/8", you simply layer the ribbon, letting it slightly overlap itself until you build up the width that you want. The curves take the most practice--and the tighter the curve, the more practice it takes. That's where the Clover iron comes in handy though--helping you to get you fingers and the iron into much smaller areas than you could with a regular iron.
Another tricky part was that in the second word: I needed strips that were much narrower than 1/8". I knew that if I didn't cut the ribbon in half lengthwise, it wouldn't have the brush script effect. So. . . I started slicing that Black Hot Ribbon in half, or as close to half as I could come! That piece on the lower left is ribbon that I had sliced lengthwise.
And here is the final version, minus a few little corrections with my sharpest scissors after I pulled it up off of the glass.
This is what it look like when you are pulling it off of the glass surface. (Ever had a good sunburn? :-D) I was amazed at how well the letters retained their curves, since the glue backing had solidified with the curves in place.
Here are the letters laid out, with the little scissor corrections made, Out of two packages of black Hot Ribbon, I had about 26 inches left--not enough to made a border. . . I debated ordering more, but I knew that I'd rather just finish it.
Here I have ironed the letters on and put together most of my pillow front.
To finish, I topstitched the patterned cloth close to the borders, then added a row of Silver Hot Ribbon to frame the muslin piece, along with some black accent buttons (Papertrey Ink Vintage buttons). That's an 18" pillow form--the perfect size for our sofa. The sentiment is to remind the Mama here--oops, that would be me--to keep a kind tongue about me, even when I am standing there loading the dishwasher with the last dish from the sink, and DS plops his two-day-old crusty dishes right into my formerly clean sink. It's almost like teenagers can't see that yawning hole of a dishwasher door. . . That's okay. "Love spoken here." He won't remember about the dishes when I am old, but I want him to remember that Mama was kind, you know?
I'm headed down to Orlando tomorrow for Copic Certification and Flowers classes. But I'll still be posting a good bit while I'm away since MFT's release week is coming up very soon. I also have several JustRite cards that I made for CHA and haven't posted yet--plenty of blog fodder to come. :-} Thanks for visiting!
