Here’s a fabulous fun DIY Wall Letter Craft that both kids and grown ups will love. You can buy ready-made paper mache wall letters to decorate from craft shops but this DIY hack is so easy, saves you a heap of money and is perfect for kids to make their own name wall letters for their bedroom.
There are loads of different ways you could decorate your DIY wall letters and I’ll cover some more ideas in future tutorials so watch this space, but for today we’re working on yarn wrapped DIY wall letters.
Yarn wrapped DIY wall letters are a great way to use up all those odds and ends of yarns and threads you’ve got stashed in your art and craft supplies. It’s a fun way for kids to explore, colours, textures and patterns and can be as neat or haphazard as kids like, everything looks great!
Supplies To Make Yarn Wrapped DIY Wall Letters
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- Cardboard
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Yarn US / UK
- Cool Melt Glue Gun US / UK
How To Make Yarn Wrapped DIY Wall Letters
I love that these wall letters are on a recycled cardboard base. It always feels great to save things from going in the trash doesn’t it? We used old cardboard boxes that some online orders had come delivered in because they were nice and sturdy and a good size. If you don’t have any lying around it’s worth asking your local supermarket if they can let you have some of theirs.
Start by deciding how deep and 3D you want your wall letters to be. You can make them as thick and 3D as you like. Our cardboard was quite thick and sturdy to start with so we just used one layer of it.
If you want a very deep 3D effect you’ll need to build up 3 or 4 layers of cardboard per wall letter depending on the thickness of the original cardboard itself.
Sketch out your desired letters onto one layer of cardboard and cut them out. You or the kids can draw them free hand or if you want a very regular appearance you can print out each letter the size you want from a computer and use that as a template.
We drew our wall letters freehand with the help of a ruler. We kept the letter shapes very simple and made each letter section about 5cm wide. Cutting the cardboard can be quite tough going and it’s unlikely children younger than teens will manage it on their own.
Once you’ve got one layer of cardboard cut for each letter, use these as a template to cut out more layers to achieve your desired 3D effect. When all your layers are cut out simply glue them together with the cool glue gun.
Now it’s time to have fun decorating your DIY wall letters! If you’ve got very young kids doing this project you can start off with a layer of paint as a base. This can be a good idea if your kids are likely to be very random and scanty with the yarn wrapping as it stops the plain cardboard showing through. If you’re planning on covering all of the cardboard like we have then you won’t need a paint layer first.
1 – To start yarn wrapping, use the cool glue gun to fix your first length of yarn onto the back of the cardboard letter.
2 – Then simply wrap, wrap, wrap
3 – For a really neat finish we glue gunned the yarn onto the end of the cardboard.
4 – Once we’d got a base layer of yarn we glued on additional layers of colour until the wall letter was decorated as much as we wanted. Try to do all the gluing onto the back of your wall letters because it can get a bit messy looking
If you want your DIY wall letters to be very tidy and fully covered in yarn, you’ll find that some sections of letters will require the yarn to be wrapped in different directions to cover the cardboard. You can see some examples of how we achieved this in the photographs below.
It’s fun to mix and match colours and layers of yarn to create different effects. Our example is quite neat and tidy but younger kids can really enjoy this activity too, wrapping the yarn in any direction they choose. Each letter will be as unique and special as the child that made it!
Once your yarn wrapped DIY wall letters are finished you can fix them on a wall using the yarn on the back to slide over a wall hook or stick them on with sticky wall pads. They also look great resting on a shelf or windowsill.
What an easy way to update and revamp a kid’s bedroom. Of course the yarn wrapping doesn’t have to stop there, you could use the same idea to make cardboard templates of other things to yarn wrap too; how about a boat, flower or car?
You can check out lots of other exciting girls and boys bedroom ideas here, perhaps your kids have a favourite theme that would work well with this idea?
(This post is in collaboration with Homify, all opinions are my own.)