Fabric On Canvas Christmas DIY

Create a custom wall hanging or painting by transferring your design onto a stretched canvas with iron on fabric sheets.

Super simple DIY...


With each Christmas that passes, I seem to simplify my holiday decor a little bit more. Gone are the days of ornaments stuffed in baskets and Santas on every surface.

I'm done wasting precious hours setting it all up, taking it all down and dusting it all in between.

That doesn't however mean that I'm a decor Grinch.

On the contrary. I still love to decorate my home for Christmas. I'm just a whole lot more discerning now.

Take my bedroom for instance.

This season I was hoping to add a Christmas pillow to my bed and a festive sign to the master bathroom wall ~ both in green to coordinate with my existing decor ~ and I was very excited about it.

Unfortunately, my search for the perfect items fell flat.

The pillows were either too colorful or too large and the gift bags I had located for the bathroom wall weren't the right sizes in the hues I needed.

Ugh.

Then I got an idea, well, for the pillow, at least. I would make my own. Brilliant.

While I had never done it before, I knew that I could create a pattern using a program like PicMonkey and I could use iron on transfer paper to place it on the pillow.

In theory, at least, it was genius.


I started by gathering my supplies. A pillow form, some ball fringe, white fabric and the iron on transfer sheets. I bought the ones for light fabrics, since I would be working with a white surface.




Then I sat down at my computer and began the design process. I mocked up several different wreaths and one tree, using colors I couldn't find on store shelves.

To visual them with my decor, I printed them up and placed them on the bed to see which I liked best.

Once I decided,  grabbed my sewing supplies and began working on my pillow cover.

Then on a chance encounter at Target, I found a darling placemat I loved and whipped up a pillow cover from it in about ten minutes flat.


Of course, the bummer of the situation was that I had already opened the transfer paper and printed on it and I had spent a bit of time on the project...and wasn't really ready to abandon it.

But with Christmas a little more than a week away and a house full of guests scheduled to arrive for an early celebration, I gathered all of my unused supplies to put in the craft cabinet for next year.

As luck would have it, as I was making room for them, a brand new stretched painting canvas fell out of the cabinet.

When I picked it up, I realized that canvas was in fact fabric and I could probably iron my design on to it and hang it in my bathroom.

So I decided to give it a try and I'm glad I did, because this last minute whim of a crafty DIY went so well, I can see myself doing again and again.

And it doesn't have to be for the holidays.

With rollers in my hair and my trusty bathrobe covering my party clothes, I carefully measured where I wanted my print to go.

My design had been printed on the paper days earlier, as per the directions included in the packet.


Next, I grabbed my trusty crafting iron (something cheap). Yes, I have two. I highly suggest this. I would never want to use the one I create with on my clothes.

It has years of sticky ick and perhaps paint and glue on it. I clean it off after each use, but I don't trust that it's clean enough for garments.


I checked the internet to see if I could find a tutorial of someone else trying this, but came up empty handed. So it was a bit of an experiment, but frankly, it worked great.

I did end up with a few silver marks on the canvas from the iron, where the iron hit the wood frame...who knows why...but they came out with a pencil eraser.

I just went slow with the ironing, following the instructions and when I peeled the backing away, my print was perfect.


I gave it few minutes to dry, while I took the curlers out of my hair, and then I gave the entire canvas a coat of decoupage why a bristle brush to seal it up with a Christmas kiss of sparkle.


In the end, I was super happy. The design looked great with my bedding and would've made a fabulous pillow.

I'm thinking about making one after all. I just need to remove the word JOY and it'll be a year round accessory.


In the meantime, this pretty canvas print could go anywhere in my home as a holiday accent.

I moved it around from room to room, combining it with other holiday favorites...


...but settled on the master bathroom wall since that was my original intention.

It's just the touch I was looking for to decorate the room.


Simple.

Clean.

Elegant...and definitely Christmas.


Plus it matches the tissue box.

But only because I went shopping this week. 😉

Merry Christmas!

Have you ever tried iron on paper?