Handmade Wall Art

Tonight I dropped my roadside treasure at my parents' house, where it will reside in their garage until I refinish it. Don't judge a book by its cover... It looks rough now, but think of the potential!

Awhile back on Pinterest I was searching for ideas for making large, inexpensive wall art. Something that came up quite a few times was the fabric wall collage. The first one I did right away for my living room:

The second one I completed last night for a wall in my bedroom. Instead of canvases like above, the fabric in this collage was stretched across embroidery hoops. 

I've been collecting the hoops for a couple months from flea markets and garage sales, and a few were given by my mom, who no longer uses them for their actual purpose. Over the weekend I dug through the remnant tables and bins at Fabricland and found all of the fabrics. A few of the remnants are pretty large - up to a yard and a half! - which leaves me a nice amount of fabric for some other future project. All in all, the fabrics cost $13 and I think all together I spent about $7 on the hoops between the different sales. 

To start, I framed the fabric where I most liked the design placement and trimmed the edge to about 1 inch around. 

Using a glue gun, I applied hot glue along the inner rim and glued down all the edges so it would be neat. This is not really necessary if you think you might use those hoops again in the future or might want to change out the fabric seasonally, but I chose to use glue to keep them sturdy. 

I repeated this process on all of the hoops. 

Having tried to hang these in the past and realizing they will fly off the wall (and frighten the cat) if it's particularly windy outside and my windows are open, I tried a different approach. I used a combination of a single nail to hang each one, plus some clear, removable & restickable wall adhesive. I am hoping even when windy, the adhesive will keep them from flying away. 

I thought it would be a good idea to lay out my design arrangement on the bed before starting to hang them, but Lily had other ideas:

After removing the cat I was able to finish hanging the hoops, and I really think it turned out nicely.

A design like this is versatile because I will be able to add on to the collage any time I want to. I'll remain on the hunt for wooden embroidery hoops so when the mood strikes, I'll be ready.