No Sew Fabric Wall Hanging-Faith's Guest Post

This Art Deco-inspired leaping deer was really, really easy to do.  Anyone who can use a pair of scissors, an iron, and a can of spray glue can do this!  Here are instructions.

Materials:

Cotton Fabric (quilting fabric works great)

Heat N Bond Ultrahold Iron-On Adhesive (the 17"-5 yds No-sew one)

Mat Board

Scissors

Iron

Spray Adhesive (permanent)

I wanted a piece of wall art that could go on a picture rail and perfectly match the colors of the rug in our new living room.  We have deer that come and visit us out here in the country, so I wanted to make something with a deer and preferably out of fabric since I work with it so much.  I love the Art Deco style, so I came up with a leaping deer design I found in a photo of some old stonework.  Because I just wanted the shape of the deer, I put the photo up on the computer, held a thin sheet of paper over it, and very lightly traced the deer directly from the screen.  Now, I know pressing on the computer screen is really bad, so again, very lightly tracing with a soft black color pencil works great with hardly any pressure! 

I knew I wanted the deer surrounded by interesting flora and trees that matched the rug and kept with the Art Deco theme.  To do this, I used a bunch of paint samples that were perfect matches to the rug and took the paint samples with me to the fabric store.  I bought a fat quarter for the backing and four 1/4 yds. of fabric both in my color palette and with intricate, organic designs that I liked.  They were easy-to-find quilt fabrics with Asian-influenced designs.  But, this is a GREAT project for fabric scraps!  The Heat N Bond can be purchased with a Joann's coupon for $10 or on amazon.com for about $12.  It might sound steep, but one roll of Heat N Bond lasts and lasts.  I am on my second roll.  My first roll lasted from 2006-2011, for easily 20 different crafts.

Once I had all of my fabrics, I cut out approximately 8 x 10" sheets of Heat N Bond to iron on to the wrong side of my fabrics.  **It's very important to iron on the adhesive BEFORE you cut out your fabric shapes!  This seals any edges that want to fray on your cut-out shapes and prevents your ironing board and iron from being covered with ooey gooey mess.  (I learned the hard way.)  You can use stencils to trace onto the paper side of the Heat N Bond and then cut, which is what I did for the deer, or cut out images on the fabric like I did for the flowers and trees.  The only fabric that should not have iron-on adhesive on it is the backing.  I used a blueish fabric for the sky, tan fabric for the ground, and then decided to use the flora cut-outs to overlap the edges of the sky and ground to both hide any less than perfectly straight edges and make it more like an abundance of trees and flowers!  Once I had everything cut out, I peeled off the paper backing from the Heat N Bond and laid all my pieces out on my craft table.  The sky and ground is layered first onto the dark gray backing.  Then the deer and all the flora around the edges.  Once I had everything in position to my liking, I ironed it all on, all at once.  You need to use a hard surface for this.  After it cooled, I sprayed the back of it as well as a 16 x 20" piece of mat board lightly with all purpose spray adhesive, then placed the fabric on top of the mat board, wrapping and sticking the fabric edges around the back of the mat board.

It was only after I finished that I noticed the swirls in the fabric of the deer coincidentally formed the deer's smiling mouth and eye!  My daughters loved this!

Here's the finished piece in place!

-Faith

This is a guest post from our dear friend, Faith. We met Faith in our mom's club, about five years ago.  Faith is a crafting genuis and we asked her to share some of her ideas with us (and our followers).  We hope you enjoy this post and are inspired by her creation. She plans on sharing at least one more project (and more, if we can convince her).  Thank you, Faith!  We love it.