Monday, 21 April 2014

Adventures in Crafting: Canvas Posters

I'm not very good at crafting.

And by that, I mean, what I craft usually turns out, and I enjoy creating things, but I never get around to it. I have all sorts of plans in the making, and several things laying around, just waiting to be crafted into perfection, but I very rarely work on them. Most of them require something more and I just forget to buy it, but there are things that I could finish if I just did it.

A very long time ago, M and I bought some posters. We got two sets, one set had eight vintage movie posters, and the other set had eight world war two era posters. We bought them just after we moved into the house, which was two years ago. So they have been sitting in the sewing room, and then the office and then the guest room since then. Every now and then, we'd talk about how we wanted them mounted. We looked at frames, at paying to get them mounted on canvas, on just buying some canvas, but we'd decide whatever option was too expensive and to do it later. Right, later...


Well I was at a craft store and I saw the exact right sized canvas on sale (6 for $18) so I called him and bought them. I bought a bottle of Mod Podge and some paint brushes, too, even though I could have found them cheaper, I just didn't care anymore. I wanted this project done.



 We picked our favourite six (three from each set) and I put on a movie on in the background.


I painted a thin layer of Mod Podge over the whole canvas and before any of it could dry, I carefully pressed a poster to it.


I pressed the top of the poster down first, and then flipped the whole thing upside down so I could press the canvas right to the poster without stretching the canvas.


After that all dried, I covered the top of the poster with a thin layer of Mod Podge, making sure to get in all the edges between the canvas and the poster.


After the first few hours, there were air bubbles all over, and none of the posters looked very good. I was upset and tried each one a little differently, hoping to get the bubbles worked out, but nothing seemed to work. I tried weighting some of them and I put different amount of glue on the canvas. Then I just painted the top of the pictures and left them out to dry. The next day, most of the bubbles were gone. Perhaps the canvas stretched away when it got wet, and then it tightened up once it was dry. Who knows? What matters is that despite all my worrying and fretting, everything turned out okay.

It took us forever again to get the pictures put up on our walls, but here they are!


I have the world's worst lighting in my living room, and suddenly my couch seems tiny and the posters seem smaller, but I think in real life they fill the space nicely.


Oh, and there are three World War II era posters that will go somewhere else in the house. They have yet to be hung.

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