DIY tapestry.

This tapestry is made of the old oversized Christmas gift sack. I got it years ago and used it once. I kept it because I knew I can make something pretty out of it and I did! It will perfectly fit into any room that has a wall space large enough to display this DIY tapestry. Let’s see how I made it!

Supplies needed to make DIY tapestry.

  • Fabric cut out, small quilt or any other fabric large piece you like to use. If fabric is thin use two layers so it holds form better. IDEAS: use a pretty towel, placemat or a shortened table runner that already has a pretty print.
  • Hot glue and glue sticks or any glue that works with wood and fabric.
  • Any wooden square dowels or flat backed trim pieces. They should be longer than width of your fabric piece. Use lighter wood. Mine are chunky 1×2 trim pieces and the bottom one won’t stay flat against the wall.
  • Strong twine or picture hanging wire.
  • Eye hooks. I will use them, but if you don’t have any simply secure the twine around the top dowel ends by wrapping around the wood ends and tying knots to secure it.

How to make DIY tapestry.

1. Cut fabric to size.

2. Cut wood to size or have home improvement store cut it to size for you. If you do not have a large saw and love DIY projects consider investing into an Occilating multi tool kit. They are in $50 rice range and very easy to use. I use mine for any small to medium thickness wood cuts.

I started with this old gift sack and cut in to size I needed.

3. Attach mug hooks to the top side of the top wood piece.

4. Paint or stain wood if desired. I am using acrylic paint.I find that acrylic paint in brown looks great and has practically no odor so that is what I will use to paint the wood. Also I will show my favorite dark washing trick that makes wood look aged. Simply take wet paper towel, squirt some acrylic paint on it and wipe it on the wood surface until covered. It may require few wet paper towel/paint applications to cover the entire piece.

Once you have applied the paint, immediately wipe it off with a dry paper towel. Watch video in this post to see how I did it. Do not paint the backs of the wood, they will not be visible because that’s where you will be attaching the fabric to them.

Leave back side of the wood unpainted, only paint front and sides.

In the video you can see how beautiful wood grain stands out after the application.

5. Once wood is dry (you can use hairdryer to speed up the process, but after wiping excess paint with dry paper towel I did not need to do that). Go ahead and attach the tapestry fabric to the wood by hot gluing it. I applied glue on fabric then pressed wood pieces onto the glue. If you mess up this step you can quickly pull the fabric off and reapply glue( top part was crooked so I had to do it 2 times!). This will work when glue is still warm and fabric is thick so it won’t get ruined by being pulled.

6. Attach wire or twine to the eye hooks to hang tapestry, then hang it on a wall and enjoy!

In the image below you can see how heavy bottom wood piece won’t stay flat
against the wall, so next time I will use thinner wood.

And this DIY tapestry project was lots of fun! I hope you try it and have fun as well, if you do, please let me know how it turns out.

Till next project!

Nadia

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: