Garden Inspirational Art

I put together this decorative canvas to hide a rusted fan cover that's mounted onto the brick wall beside my deck today.

My mother was visiting and told me about a botanical garden she toured and that these words were on a plaque, and I thought they were lovely.
  
Disclaimer: I should have written Buddah instead of God since I'm more of a Buddhist, but I was on auto pilot today and my Catholic upbringing is ingrained in my soul. 


Here it is hung over the fan cover with the recent addition of a butterfly made out of feathers.

I'm placing a very simple tutorial behind the cut.

I used plastic corrugated board because this is going to get rained on.  I used my dad's rusty metal thingum to make sure everything was square, and cut it with a box cutter.

I sprayed the board with adhesive.

I placed my ironed cotton fabric over the board and smoothed it down.

Then cut our the corners as shown.

Then I sprayed more adhesive and folded the edges over and smoothed them out.

I bought adhesive letters in the dollar store, but you can used stencils.  Whatever photos are sideways here are that way because I forgot to rotate them before uploading and...I'm too lazy to fix them.

I stuck down the letters for my message and traced them out with a fine point gel pen.

I just lied, didn't I? I rotated this photo just for you because I thought the instruction would be more straight forward - I'm nice that way.  Anyway. I didn't have enough letters to spell out the whole message so I traced out the letters I needed that had already been used, and then reapplied them when needed. I did math (nobody told me there would be maths!) so that the text would be spaced in a somewhat even way.

The text was then filled in with a Sharpie because I don't have a steady enough hand to paint. I did a test to see if the ink would run when it gets wet - it didn't run, fyi.

All the flowers, greenery, and other supplies came from where? If you know me, you answered the dollar store, and you were right.  For the hydrangea, I cut a styrofoam ball in half, then used a glue gun to affix the flowers on one by one .

I snipped a branch from my lilac tree and wired a bird onto it and used a glue gun to stick the branch on.  I added a hanger on the back - and there you have it - a simple project that anyone can do.  The spacing didn't turn out to be perfectly even vertically because I suck at the maths when I'm in a hurry, but I figure that we are created imperfectly, so why should our art be?