brought to you by the letter F

I was feeling a bit crafty last night but didn't want to hall out the sewing machine or get my fingers full of glue.  So I decided to rather than pin pin pin on pinterest, I would actually do something pinterest inspired.  So I decided to do something monogram inspired.  You see, I like initials, there's a silent F at the beginning of my name (F)AnnE... no, really, it's actually the first letter of our last name. I have no silent letters in my name - hence the gigantic pronounced E at the end of my name.

Ok, back to the project...

We had received two westie prints (I'll show you those on another day, don't want to blow our wad of fun all in one day!) from my sister and they came backed with foam board.  I didn't need the foam board after I framed the westie prints but figured there MUST be some project I've pinned before that I could use the foam board. I wanted to make an initial and use some of our stash of wine corks. But I wasn't sure how that would work with the letter F.  I thought that it might not work out too well.  I do however have a plethora of yarn balls sitting around just dying to get used, so I figured why not wind some yarn around the foam and call it a day? And so, I did.

First off, I found two fonts I liked and printed them off in font size 800.  The uppercase F was still a bit too small so I blew it up again on the copy machine.  I cut the letters out.  Then I traced them backwards on the foam board.  Why backwards, you ask?  Because I wasn't sure how easy it would be to cover and I didn't want pen markings on the front.

Then after some work with the scissors - which was a bit hard to get a nice clean cut, an exacto knife probably would have been easier - I cut out the letters.

And cutting out the letters makes your dog a bit worn out, so you let her take a rest.

And then you adhere the yarn to the back of the foam letter.  I used duct tape.  Why, you ask? Because any excuse to use duct tape, I'll take it. 

And then you just start winding the yarn all over the letter.  I wanted to have it look a bit disheveled, so I went over a few areas again and again to make it look interesting. In the uppercase F, I used a much thinner yarn versus that chunky cream lowercase f.  The black yarn took some time to wind around and around, so turn on some Florence and the Machine (or whatever music you like to jam to - Flo is my favorite during the moment) and wind that yarn until your foam letters are fully covered.  Next time around, I probably would have used a black sharpie to color in the thinner areas of the F just to make it easier to camouflage the foam board underneath.

The finished product.

Barkley approved.