Lesson Info
8. Canvas Stretching
Lessons
Lesson Info
Canvas Stretching
So once you have your structures in your frame, you're gonna turn your fabric over, you're gonna center your frame, then you always want to check to check. I hold the fabric over like this what bit? Just to make sure that it's looking centered on the square and that looks pretty good, so when you're stretching canvas or fabric or anything onto stretchers, you want to work somewhat methodically, you guys all used a staple gun before, so one of the common mistakes that's made when stretching something canvas or fabric onto stretchers is that people put the staple straight into the would you want to always staple on an angle so that as you are tightening the fabric it's not pulling with the weave it's tightening and stretching the fabric? It's not, um, working against or compromising the integrity of the fabric you're simply stretching otherwise it's going to loosen you could end up with a terror, so I'll show you what I mean by that. What I do is without without pulling, I'm going to tak...
e the top this is without adding any type of tension because I have it centered I'm gonna make my first staple, which is you can see caught the end of that fabric that's okay, these initial staples are not really about stretching the fabric there about getting in place, so the neck iceland you can start to pull and stretch so the next one I'm going to do as close to opposite as I can and again I'm going to staple at an angle then I'm going to do one on either side without pulling too much you'll see the fabrics gonna start to move a little bit as you start to get them on either side and then you're going to start working out from your midline a staples so here the staples sticking out a little bit so what you could either do is remove it or just top it flat like I said, these initial staples are less about pulling the fabric tight they are about just holding it so you can start to pull it so then I'm going to start creating a little bit attention as I work around and I'm always working out from that center and you'll see as you pull sometimes we get a little lip if that bothers you you can always pull out that initial staple and create another one that's totally up to you and I'm gonna pull in the opposite if you want to work up or if you want to turn it and full that's fine and I like to do three, three and three staples and then we're going to talk about what happens over here on the corners and how to finish those so again you're going to want to start to pull and again staple everything on an angle and I can see that I'm not getting the best leverage sitting down and that's why some of my staples air sticking up so I'm going to stand and already you can see I'm getting a much smoother staple and you can see how that's starting to look from the front so that looks pretty straight to me it looks like everything's looking pretty good now as I mentioned in the beginning this s was like a little bit funky so I played with the fabric a little bit so I'm going to show you from the front how you can do that so you can see here if something was looking a little bit cricket I didn't like the way it wass you can see just by pulling a little bit more on the fabric I'm really kind of moving that part of the letter so you would simply be doing that from behind you can pull apart a little bit tighter and start toe move it a little bit let me put another staple here, ok? And now we're gonna talk about what to do to make a beautiful corner and you can see these air finish these air like little hospital corners but they look like they're and they're simon to show you how to do that so you're going to come to the top you know, fold in here nice tight fold you can do either way you can go above or below it's up to you sometimes it's easier to work one way versus the other nice tight ful there and then you're gonna staple it down and then what you can do with these pieces here because you get these little bubbles that's when you work back in staple it and then I always like to see the front like does that look nice and clean yeah that looks really good that was a good one. You know what you could do is sometimes will be a little flap could go back in and put another staple their toe hold that piece down so you have to repeat that nice tight fold not when the scene needs to be talked a little bit more there we go okay sometimes one way will work better than the other that's what happened in this instance here well known you have straight pieces like this just staple now okay, so that's about what it should look like when you've got your corners down it should look pretty clean like that now if you didn't get as much tension as you would like when you were stapling or gets wet or you decide you want to work on it a little bit more you think you're finished you're like oh I just want to add a little bit there is space to rework in here so if you want to do that a great way to tighten up the whole design afterwards is to take a spray bottle. Just fill it with water. This is the one I use for ironing my glamorous life. Fill it with a regular water, you can use warm water, but I think cool is actually better, so you don't encourage any sort of lead, especially if you're using a hand dyed threat. You just want to spray the back and you'll see sometimes the water might beat up a little bit. This kind of gently take your hand and courage for water to kind of sink in there. If you did nothing at this point and you let it dry, it will get a lot tighter if you feel like you leave it and you want it tighter than it already is, turn it over, sprayed again and get out your hair dryer, hair dryer and the heat is immediately going to shrink up the fibers in the fabric and you're going to get a really nice tight attention on there and that's something you, khun d'oh on the canvas, you, khun, do it on a hoop to there's really, no need for it because you should be able toe manually tighten that, but any time that's, one of the great things about it's, what I love about using canvas stretchers after if I'm going to take something off a hoop is that you can always make it really look clean and finished if it starts to loosen up just with the quick spray to make it look nice and tight. That has a really nice, neat, finished look goods have questions about any of the finishing ok, so in terms of hanging something like this there's a lot of different options you could use picture wire could do I hooks here in here, paying a little picture wire with a hook? You could also just hang this on a nail you really wanted to get rustic and the nice thing again about using the canvas stretchers I'll bring this back over here is that you actually have something that you can lean, you don't necessarily have to hang it. Something like this looks really nice, leaning up against something or completely flat on a coffee table looks nice, too, so I'll bring that other one over so you can see way pretend that this isn't what, but that looks nice, too. That was a really good suggestion that about the water on the back of the frame and the hair dryer that was great that's because trying to get things titus really hard and you'll find to that with time, I mean, I have paintings that I painted decades ago that just from hanging in my house have just the canvas, even with paint on and even with acrylic paint, that's has a high plastic content to it. Things do loosen they're in the sun or heat, air conditioning, whatever. So I'm always just kind of taking paintings down, turn them over, doing the hair dryer and needlework too. You can do that with water, you know? You have to be careful, especially if you're using anything that's, hand dyed, any threat test it first sort of being like hey definitely tested first, most threads shouldn't bleed with just a quick spray if it does, and you're testing it, try just using a hair dryer. Sometimes the heat will just tighten it right up. Thanks so much for joining us today for customizing your important re I hope that you can take all the tools we learned today and not only create this beautiful project, but work on another one yourself that yields different results. To keep up with me online to see what I'm doing to check out some of my designs, you can visit my web site at selma rose dot com or follow me on instagram for shots of what needlework I'm doing or what new designs I'm working on, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time bye!
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