Crafting with Krista

Krista has most definitely caught the crafting bug!

I seem to be visiting Krista and her family in San Diego more and more often lately.  With the cold we’ve been experiencing here in Buffalo, this is NOT a bad thing!  How lucky am I to be retired!

Krista had recently made a cork-covered letter to her friend, Jen, and wanted to make a different letter for another coworker, Rachelle.  I had brought all kinds of yarn with me to keep me busy away from home, and she decided this bulky variegated yarn would look nice on the wooden letter (13″ from Hobby Lobby) and would be less likely to show through, being close in color to the light wood.

We had no instructions, so we just went with our gut.  Krista chose to go with a diagonal wrap, just to be different from several designs we had found on Pinterest.  It was probably a little more difficult than a horizontal wrap, but we had two pairs of hands, so it was no biggie.

We decided to start in the middle of the letter and work in both directions.  We had a small amount of plain old Elmer’s glue left in a squeeze bottle, so we added enough water so it could be sloshed around to make it watery but still sticky.  We squirted some on the letter, and spread about a 3″ wide swath with a fat art brush.

At first we were going to eyeball the wrapping, but soon found that the stripes of yarn slowly went off-kilter.  So we drew a bunch of parallel lines on the wood to stay straight.

It’s a good thing we had 2 people working on this, because as we came to the curves, the yarn wanted to roll to the narrower edge. We started the wrap on the back, laid the front down and patted it down gently so the glue wouldn’t end up showing, and continued the yarn around the back.  I should have taken a picture of the back – it looked just as nice as the front!

We also used full-strength Tacky glue on the curved edges to insure that the yarn wouldn’t slip in time.  We only wrapped about 3″ or 4″ at a time, letting it dry a little between wraps.  Krista also smeared some glue under the yarn on the back when we finished, again, to make sure the yarn wasn’t going anywhere.

To finish it off, we made 3 flowers for an accent: a loopy crochet navy flower,  and two different size pom-poms, one grey and the other a beige/grey mix.  These were glued on and allowed to dry overnight.

I recently saw the letter in Rachelle’s office, on a shelf behind her desk – so cute!