Creating your own wall hanging is a great way to instantly add some texture and color to a plain wall. You can find beautiful wall hangings at most home stores, but sometimes they are not so budget-friendly. Making your own work of art will not only give you a custom, one-of-a-kind piece, but it’s also fairly inexpensive to do. I put together this vintage dinosaur wall hanging for our son’s bedroom— and I’m here to walk you through my process.
THE SUPPLIES
- Canvas fabric artwork
- 1” dowel rods
- Jute Twine
- Stain
- Matte polyurethane
FIND ARTWORK
First step— you need to find some artwork, preferably in a digital download format. I will be using this vintage dinosaur digital download from Etsy, but you can use any artwork you choose.
GET IT PRINTED
Next, you will need to get your digital download printed. I am getting my digital artwork printed onto a canvas fabric. There are many places that offer canvas printing, such as Office Depot and Staples. I am getting mine printed through Spoonflower, an online store where you can print your own fabric. Simply upload your own image (in my case, the vintage dinosaur art). Here is a screen grab of my settings.
- REPEAT: I don’t want my image to repeat, so select “center”
- CHOOSE A FABRIC: I chose Cypress Cotton Canvas
- CHOOSE A SIZE & AMOUNT: I needed less than a yard. Since the minimum order is 1 yard, I added a few other prints to fill my yard. I’m not sure if I will use the smaller prints, but I figured it was worth filling the space provided.
SEWING THE PRINT
I am going to hem the right and left sides of the print and then sew a pocket for the dowel rods to slide into.
If you can’t sew, do not be afraid to tackle this project. Instead of sewing, you could use a product like Steam-A-Seam or even just hot glue it. Here is a breakdown of how I hemmed my canvas print.
PREPPING THE DOWEL RODS
You will need two dowel rods, one for the top and one for the bottom of your wall hanging. The overall size of my wall hanging is 40” wide by 27” high. I started by cutting two 1” dowel rods down to 40”.
To be able to attach the twine (to hang your wall art), you have to drill holes straight through one of the dowel rods. I drilled two holes, one on the far right side and one on the far left side of the dowel rod (about 1” in from the ends).
Once all of the cuts were made and holes were drilled, I stained the dowel rods with this Zar stain in Modern Walnut. After the stain had a good 24 hours to dry, I finished them with 2 coats of matte polyurethane.
ASSEMBLING THE WALL-HANGING
All of the hard work is done! Simply slide the finished dowel rods into the pockets on your canvas, attach the twine for hanging, and hang it on the wall.
Let your creativity run wild! You could start with a digital artwork file like I did, or perhaps you already have something around in your home that you could use to make your own wall hanging, like some yarn or leftover fabric. What type of wall hanging would you create?
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4 Responses
I’m trying SO HARD to replicate this but can’t figure out how you were able to add all 3 images. Spoon flower will only let me add the one main one.
Hi Veronica! Make sure you have the image at the correct size you need it to be before you upload it to spoonflower. And then once you upload it to spoon flower, don’t set it on repeat, make sure it is centered. It should fit right on a yard of fabric. If the image is too small when it upload it, it will also print small . So make sure it is resized before you upload it. To get more than one image, you need to layout the photos on one image if that makes sense? I just created a document with the same dimensions as one yard of fabric and put all three images in the document. Hope that helps! Feel free to email me if you have any more questions
Please go into detail on how you got the image correct on Spoonflower. I used the same Etsy shop for the image but I can’t figure out how you sized it correctly and also how you added the other images. Should I be using my desktop? Can you please explain further. I have all the materials for this project but don’t want to waste money incorrectly formatting.
Hi Crissy— I’m happy to help! I used photoshop to size my image. I’m sure there are similar programs you can use if you don’t have access to photoshop. I set up a blank document the same size as 1 yard of fabric (56″ wide by 36″ tall) at 150 dpi (like Spoonflower requests). I just placed my image on that document and made it as large as I could to fill the yard. I just threw the other two pictures on there as well to fill my yard of fabric, no point wasting the space. And then I saved that document as a jpeg. Does that make sense? Feel free to shoot me an email if you need any further explanation.