Back in April, Tom’s best friend Kevin got married. His bride Katie has made a few appearances around here, for craft nights, painting sessions, and sunflower-field frolicking.

They are our best friends. And I wanted to make a gift for them. Something that would be special and meaningful.

I landed on painting a canvas with lyrics from their first-dance song.

I sketched it out a bunch of times, debated over canvas sizes (I went with a 20″x24″), horizontal versus vertical, and what sorts of colors to use (purple was their wedding color; and can be found in several rooms in their home).

The how: I painted the purple background first, and let it dry for several days (ahem) weeks. Then I got up the courage to add the letters. I measured four evenly-spaced lines horizontally across the canvas,  lightly wrote out some of the words in pencil, and then busted out a super small paintbrush and some white acrylic paint. So really, I free-handed the whole thing. I actually find this easier than trying to trace out letters or stencils. I don’t have that kind of patience 😉

Once all of the words were up, I selected some special words to “highlight” and added the extra lines and accents. I also added the date of their wedding at the bottom.

I’m really happy with how it turned out. I want to do one for our bedroom some day.

And Kevin and Katie loved it 🙂 Yay! (cue huge sigh of relief!)

Have you hand-made wedding gifts before? How did they turn out?