More Mother's Day....DIY Canvas Tote Bag

Well my aim was to get this up on Thursday, but as you can see...that didn't happen! Better late than never, right?

This little project is so simple that you could run out to the craft store now and pick up the supplies and have it completed in under 30 minutes!

Once again, I bought the supplies for this at A.C. Moore. Here's what you need:

Materials:
Canvas Tote Bag
Iron-On Printable Transfer Paper
Iron
Pillowcase
Scissors
Parchment paper

Once you have everything rounded up, you'll need to create the design that will go on the bag. I originally wanted to use Wordle but my printer didn't like the site and wouldn't print my word cloud. So....I had to find another site that did word clouds and I'm kind of glad I did. Wordle is AWESOME, but you can't really do shapes. With ImageChef you can and there are tons of shapes to choose from!

There are pros and cons with both sites. For example, on ImageChef you can't print right from the site. You have to save your image as a photo and then insert it into MS Paint or MS Word. I chose Word because I'm very familiar with it. It's an extra step, but I was willing to take it to get that heart shape!

Here's a screen shot of my word mosaic on ImageChef.

 

 

And here's what it looks like saved from an image on my hard drive.


 

 

As I stated above, I inserted this into a blank MS Word document and then printed it out on the transfer paper. Make sure to read the instructions on the transfer paper before using it. I know that sounds silly, but there's a right side and a wrong side to print on.

 

After you have your image printed onto the transfer paper then you can get prepped to iron. At this point you'll want to cut the image out into the shape that you'd like it to be. Keep in mind that if you have white transfer paper the edges will not blend into fabric that isn't white. So if you want the lines clean and crisp make sure you use a good set of scissors. I left mine a little jagged because I liked the way it looked.  

 

The transfer paper you purchased should have specific instructions on how to proceed with transferring the image to your fabric. I'm going to give you the run-down of what the product I bought said.

 

Pre-heat your iron to the hottest cotton setting you can and turn off the steam! Place a pillowcase over your ironing board and put your tote bag on top of that. Run the iron over the tote bag to remove any wrinkles.

 

Now, the transfer paper should have a backing. It took me almost 10 minutes to get the backing paper off the first heart. I was getting extremely frustrated, but I just had to find a good point and try to get the backing paper to lift. For some reason, the second one wasn't as tough as the first one.

 

Next, you'll want to set the image on your tote bag. At this point, you can put it wherever you like. I toyed with tilting the hearts on mine a bit, but in the end, as you can see above, I left them centered and straight. I didn't use a ruler for this - I just eyeballed it.

 

Cut a sheet of parchment paper slightly bigger than your image and lay it over top of the image. Next, take you iron and lightly pass over the image going slowly and applying very light pressure. Do this at least 5 times applying light pressure. Make sure to get all around the edges and/or any corners of your image. Then, go over it again 5 more times with very firm pressure, again making sure to pay close attention to the edges and/or corners of the image.

 

The instructions that came with my transfer paper made it seem like the parchment paper would stick to the image, but it did not. Once you've made your final 5 passes, let it cool for a moment and remove the parchment paper. If you plan to do more than one bag, you can reuse the sheet of parchment.

Here's one of mine hot off the press.

At first, I thought it didn't take or I printed the image on the wrong side of the paper, but once I ran my hand over the image I could tell that it would be okay. It feels as if the image is part of the fabric now.

I chose the word cloud because of the Subway Art I also did for Mom and MIL. If you missed that post you can find it here. I love the word cloud idea and v1.6 was great with helping me come up with adjectives to describe his Grammies!

So there you have it! Super simple and handmade Mother's Day gift that they're sure to love! The only thing I would change is probably find a transfer paper that doesn't have a white background OR dye the canvas bags another color. Hindsight is always 20/20!

I hope you enjoyed this little craft! To all the Mamas out there...Happy Mother's Day! :)

Ciao for now, bellas!