Embroidered keepsake canvas using children's drawings

I am really enjoying being a Bostik Blogger and receiving a fab pack of crafty goodies each month to create with. This month the theme is Scrapbooking, and when I saw that the box included a canvas I decided to use the theme of preserving memories to make a keepsake canvas which included some of the children's drawings. Mia has just started to produce recognisable art, and I love the way that both children draw.

The box included felt and embroidery silks, and as I love sewing with felt I decided to make an embroidered canvas, decorated with some colourful crafty embellishments which the children could choose and help to arrange.

You need:

Small canvas (mine measures 20cm x 20cm)
Coloured felt for the background
Embroidery silks in contrasting colours
Bostik foam pads
Embellishments - for example buttons, paper cutouts, stickers etc.
Thin tissue paper
Willing children!

Instructions:

See numbered notes below for the detailed instructions.

1 - Gather together all your materials. Plan the layout for your canvas and what you would like to include. I used a picture drawn by each child and their name as written by them, for a younger child you could draw around their hands and write their name yourself.

2 - Take your child's drawing and trace it onto thin tissue paper. It's a good idea to simplify the drawing a little at this point, if of course you can do so without losing the essence of the child's work!

3 - Cut your felt to the same size as the canvas., then cut out all the elements on tissue paper that you want to use and spend some time finalising the arrangement. Make sure that you leave enough space for a border around the edge.

4 - Pin the pieces of tissue paper firmly to the felt, then take your embroidery thread and sew through both the tissue paper and the felt. I used three strands of the embroidery silk and I chose the children's favourite colours - pink and green. It doesn't matter if your stitches aren't that neat, my stitches are often all over the place but it doesn't matter as you are trying to achieve a childish look to your work!

5 - When you have finished sewing, very carefully tear away the tissue paper to leave the embroidery. You might need tweezers to remove all the tiny pieces, and if the stitches have lifted you may need to rearrange them by pulling from the other side. I won't lie, it's quite a fiddly and time consuming process which is why simpler designs work best. You need to be careful not to pull too hard and make your stitches too loose. But I think it looks pretty cool when it's done!

6 - Admire your finished work!

7 - Repeat this process for each piece of tissue paper until the sewn part of the canvas is complete.

8 - When you have finished the embroidery, glue the felt piece to the canvas. I used white glue, and used just a thin line of glue around the edges.

9 - Gather the materials that you would like to use to decorate around the border. I used a mixture of brightly coloured buttons and flower cut outs. I like them because they are the sorts of embellishments that I use with the children when we are crafting together - it's like a snapshot in crafting time to go along with the ages that they are when I created this canvas! The children enjoyed choosing which bits and pieces I should use and where they should go.

10 - To adhere the embellishments to the felt I used Bostik foam pads. These little pads are extremely sticky and easily stuck to the felt. They are also small and neat, and I was able to place them around the edges of the buttons, sometimes using a couple, without them being visible through the holes in the button.

11 - The Bostik foam pads add a nice raised texture to the canvas. They are also squashy enough that the embellishments can be overlapped slightly. I did vaguely plan the arrangement of the border in advance so that I could achieve a good mix of colours and shapes.

12 - The finished canvas! All it needs is the date added on the back. I'm so pleased with it!

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club. I have been compensated for providing this tutorial.