Step 1.
I spent some time looking around for old sheet music, but thanks to my industrious husband ended up with a few vintage hymnals purchased cheaply on eBay. The first step is to adhere the pages to a blank canvas. I was NOT happy with the Krylon spray adhesive I bought at Michael's for this purpose. In retrospect, a basic decoupage technique would have worked better (I ended up decoupaging several stubborn pages back down to the canvas once the entire project dried!). Be sure to overlap the pages as you glue them down. None of the canvas should be peeking through once you've covered the whole thing.
A helpful tip: If you are using paper that you've torn out of a book, take a few extra minutes to trim the ripped edges if you want a cleaner, smoother final product.
The spray adhesive needed to dry for 3 hours before the tackiness would set, so I actually left it overnight just to be safe. I was a bit paranoid that step two would rip the old hymnal pages if I wasn't terribly careful.
Step 2.
This part is the genius idea of the Beautiful Mess girls. Once you've decided what phrase/lyric you want to highlight on the canvas, head over to your favorite local craft store and pick up some of these lovelies. A Beautiful Mess used permanent adhesive letters, while I opted for repositionable ones (again, paranoid that the adhesive would tear my older, soft papers).
For this project, a 36" x 48" canvas, I opted for 3" letters in the Helvetica font. Wanting to align my lyric to the right edge of the canvas, I started laying the letters out from the top right corner, working my way in toward the center of the canvas. This ensured that I had plenty of space for the words without running off the canvas's edge. My apologies for forgetting to take a photo of this step. It actually looked pretty cool with the sheet music and bold, black lettering. I was tempted to leave it alone at this point...but I wanted a pop of color on my white nook wall.
Step 3.
I chose to spray paint the canvas, mainly because it was so large and because the BM girls said they wish they had used spray paint for cleaner stenciling. If I'd had a smaller project I probably would've used basic craft paint instead. I found that in spray painting on paper, the paint bled into the letters under the stencil stickers anyway. Spray paint allowed me to achieve a translucent quality that leaves the music sheets across the canvas visible, but it was a messy pain in the arse to execute. I did it on a cold, windy day, which didn't help. And this might go without saying, but be sure to use a spray paint meant for paper and fabrics, not the type you'd find on your husband's tool shelves in the garage.
As I try to make things as cheaply as possible, I decided not to buy the 3 packs of stencil stickers that would have been necessary to get all of the E's I needed for my lyric. Instead, I stuck on the first half only, covered the bottom portion of the papered canvas with cardboard, and sprayed the majority of the canvas. After about 15 minutes it was dry. I then peeled up the letters I needed to reuse, blocked out all the lettering for the 2nd half of the lyric, covered the already-completed lyric with the same cardboard, and sprayed that small bottom section. I immediately peeled the rest of the stickers slowly and gently from the first half of the lyric. Only 2 of the stickers took a bit of paper with them. Once the second half was dry, I removed the last few stickers.
Step 4.
I allowed the whole canvas to fully dry, waiting to see if some of the pages would peel up from the canvas. About 50% of them did just that, so I brushed some fabric Modge Podge under each offending page and pressed them back down. Warning: Modge Podge causes paper to wrinkle in the drying process, so don't use this if you want a totally smooth final product! Since some of my pages were wrinkling at this point, I went ahead and brushed a layer of Modge Podge over the entire piece. If I hadn't used MP, I would have likely used a spray acrylic finish to cover the piece.
And, voila! Here it is hanging in its new happy spot on my wall, waiting to start a conversation.
