"I'll Love You Forever" Craft

I grew up listening to the story "I Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch, and now I often read it to my daughter for her bedtime story, so I wanted to do something with it to hang in her room.

First, a picture of the final product (they will be hung after she wakes up from her nap!):

I like how they turned out, but it was a bit of a process getting here, as I will explain.

Here are the materials I started out with:

However, since I didn't like how the original product turned out, I found that I also needed a gold metallic pen, a hot glue gun, scrap fabric, and ribbon (no picture).

I got the canvas, paint, sponge brush, pen, and glue gun at the dollar store.  The letters were from Michael's. The fabric was from my closet, but originally from http://www.tonicliving.com/ - you can order a huge bag of fabric scraps for $2.50 (plus shipping).

Step One: paint the canvas in your base colour.  I did a solid colour (pink) for mine, but you could have fun with it and do a funky pattern! (no picture).  Leave it to dry.

Step Two: stick on letter stickers.

Step Three: Paint top colour over top using sponge brush (brown).  Leave to dry.

Step Four: Peel off letter stickers.  This is where the project got frustrating.  See, my stickers did NOT come off easily, and they left coloured bits of foam all over, as you can see in the "F" in the picture below.

At first, I was not impressed and almost junked the project.  But then I decided to try out my gold metallic pen as a border, and I thought it made it better.  I also found that I didn't like the canvas without a border (too boring), so I got out the big bag of scraps and my hot glue gun and made a border by folding the fabric and gluing it on.

Then I glued on some ribbon to hang the pictures by, and VOILA, it was finished!