Feel Like Makin' LOVE.

Pinterest serves a purpose and that purpose is to inspire me to make awesome stuff.  And I am inspired.

I got these yarn-wrapped letters in my sights and couldn't forget about them.  You can see the pin here, and the blog post from which the pin was generated, here.  Adorbs!

Photo courtesy of BeyondWonderlandBlog.com

The ombre effect of the original letters is awesome!  I read the tutorial suggested on Beyond Wonderland before I went shopping so I'd know how much yard to get.  I made an executive decision to wrap my letters quite differently than the way demonstrated, and decided I didn't need to buy different colors of yarn.  I went with a solid color (Caron Simply Soft in Strawberry, $4.49) for more flexibility when it came time to display my finished project!  The papier-mache letters, normally $2.99, were on sale for $1.00 off.  All of my materials came from Jo-Ann..."all" of them being the 5 things you see in the picture below.  You will definitely need a hot glue gun through the duration of this project, set on my favorite temperature, "screaming hot."  Better have some extra glue sticks handy, too.

Many thanks to my friend Michael at Inspired by Charm for sharing with me some ideas on adding text to my photographs.  Bear with me as I get it just right!

About this time, I discovered it was much easier to wrap with a length of yarn separated from the entire yarn ball.  Basically each letter is wrapped with many separate lengths of yarn, each one hot glued to the back of the letter to begin the wrapping.  

If you looked at the original tutorial, you might have figured out by now that I did not cut the little 2" pieces of yarn to fill in on the edges.  You can see what I'm talking about here.  I wrapped continuously, either horizontally or vertically, until I covered the letter as completely as I could, then I switched to wrapping the other direction.  The yarn visibly goes in both directions on my letters.  I like it because it gives the letters even more texture and I thought it was more efficient.

My final thoughts?  Make it!  While this wasn't a quick project, the result is fabulous and it was cheap to make, especially if you already have yarn to use.  If you're going for neat, even wraps like I was, then it will be slow going.  I guess you could do it a lot faster and get a bunchier, chunkier look.  I love that the letters are BIG and will make quite the statement wherever I decide to put them.  They'd look super cute as a photo prop, too.  

I chose to leave the corners of the letters plain/the base color.  I thought about filling in with a Sharpie or doing something with fabric, but I actually like the little contrast and think it looks more handmade/shabby.  Covering with those little 2" pieces of yarn would eliminate any naked corners.  I guess you could also paint the letters first if you really wanted to, also.  

The possibilities are endless...variegated yarns, each letter a different color, and hey, I can even switch it up to spell "VOLE" for when my exterminator comes.  In closing, I will say that I am damn glad I didn't also get letters to spell "ALL YOU NEED IS."  I don't know if I would have gotten them done for this Valentine's Day!  

I've got more V-Day craft tricks up my sleeve!  It's going to be a love-ly week on The Grey Blog!  Are you crafting for V-Day?  What are you making?  I'd love to know!!