When the New Year was approaching I kept seeing people talking about their word for the coming year (2014), I had never thought of doing this before but I decide to give it a go. I could not decide on a word, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to focus on, or at least how to bring it down to one word. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that our word for the year as a family is, “wait”. If you read my last post, you would know that Stefan and I just finished up our last service as the Pastor’s of our church, and now we wait and send out resumes in search of our new jobs in a new church. So our word is wait. And the perfect Bible verse that I have been going back to over and over again is Psalms 27:14, and I decide it needed to be put up on our wall so we could see it everyday as we wait. Here is a quick tutorial on how I made it.

First I had my awesome husband design it for me, because my artistic skills resemble a preschoolers.  Next I picked up 4 8×10 canvases from the dollar store, and I painted the edges black with some acrylic paint.

I printed off the pictures and cut them to fit the canvases, and pulled out my hand dandy bottle of Mod Podge. Because our printer is an ink jet printer I knew that if I used the Mod Podge on top of the prints that the colour would bleed, so I only used it on the back of the paper. If you want to coat the top of the paper as well you need to use a laser printer (most print shops use laser, or if your printer uses toner you will be fine as well).

I painted on a thin layer of Mod Podge onto the canvas and smooth the paper out. With all 4 of them I ended up with bubbles and wrinkles, but after taking a hair dryer to them they flattened out and took on a bit of the canvas texture which was cool.

After they dried and the kids woke up the next morning I got Stefan to hang the canvases on the wall for me. I love them and I think they look great. It was a fairly quick project to do, and even though it is not perfect I love it.

So find some inspirational words or pictures and create your own canvas artwork for your home.