Alphabet Canvas

Happy March to you :) I thought I'd share with you an alphabet canvas I made for my niece, Riley. It was inspired by one I spotted in Scrapbooks, Etc magazine a few years ago. It is both fun and functional for several different reasons--first, it is a cute way to display lots of pretty paper, embellishments, and letter stickers while decorating your child's room and teaching them the alphabet---and second, it is a GREAT way to USE UP scraps of pretty paper, embellishments, and letter stickers that are hanging around and cluttering up your craft space from previous projects. All the supplies you need are a large stretched canvas (Michaels), acrylic paint, assorted papers/embellishments/letter stickers/stamped images/image stickers, and a square punch. The size punch you'll want to use will depend on the size canvas you buy--you want to ensure you can fit 48 squares on it because you will be putting on the alphabet letters every other square (approximately). I used the purple "giga" square punch from Marva (Michaels) which cuts out a 2 1/8" square for mine.

First, you want to paint the canvas, including the stretched edges, in a paint color of your choice. I just squirt the paint directly on the canvas and spread it out with a foam brush. You can use several colors of paint, if you wish. Let dry. Next, apply punched out squares in a grid format (8 across, 6 down) with strong adhesive (liquid adhesive works well). Next, apply letter stickers or chipboard letters to every other square. Then, in the blank squares between letters, apply embellishments or stamp images that start with the featured alphabet letter it is after (for example, I placed an apple on the empty square after the "a"). If you have a lot of embellishments, you can also place one on the square of the featured letter, like I did with the "b" and butterflies (the square after b was made of butterfly patterned paper which worked out well).

Now, for the second row, start with the second square and place your letter there. You'll then place your embellishment in front of each coordinating letter on this row. Alternate with each row as pictured above. You'll have plenty of room until you hit the last row and then you'll place "u" "v" and "w" next to each other, skip a square and place "x" "y" and "z" next to each other. You can even place an ampersand sticker in the empty square infront of "x" like I did. If you want to preserve it well, you can coat the entire project with Modge Podge, going around dimentional embellishments like flowers and such. It turned out really cute and was a lot of fun to make.