In my recent post coloring time I talked about making prints onto acrylic felt using fabric crayons.
To enlarge the idea into gift wrap first I made a rough pattern. I took gifts waiting to be wrapped, a cd and a dvd, and traced the outline onto a piece of plain paper. Then, to add depth, I tipped the item up along each side of my tracing and traced again along the outer edge. I ended up with a rectangle with flaps on each side. I used a ruler to straighten my lines and then add about 1/4" seam allowance. I cut it out for my pattern.
I traced the pattern onto another sheet of plain paper using a pencil and drew over the line with a fabric crayon so the outline would transfer. Then I planned my design. For words I wrote the word in the margin first, then wrote it again backwards and used the backwards design to draw my letters (in pencil) in the design area. Once I had the letters in a size and shape I liked, I drew over the outline with fabric crayon. I filled in the big letters above with random doodles that I colored in.
In my pile of "stuff" I had a saved card that turned out to be just the size of the cd-size pattern. I made rubbings of it on paper with the crayons. Some were more successful than others (yellow was a total bust--no pattern at all once ironed. Blue and purple worked better.) On the left below is one of the rubbings--you can faintly see the tree pattern. I need to work on my technique. The initial is one of the letters I made a while back in the original blog post. I closed these packages with contrasting perle cotton big running stitches so it's obvious and easy to open.
