Hey everyone!
Today I’m going to show you how to make this mid-century cat wall art.
So I started with a set of three mid-century wooden cats.
They usually come in a set like this, with different sizes (a large, a medium and a smaller
one) and I wanted to make them more prominent.
You can just hang them straight on the wall like this and it would be adorable.
But I wanted it to take up a little more space, and so I put them on these frames with fabric,
and so I’m going to show you how to do this.
So you’re going to need a frame in the size that you like.
I decided to do two different frames for the three cats.
You could also put them all in one big frame or three separate frames.
And then you’ll need some kind of textured fabric.
I went with a Sunbrella that has this kind of tweed pattern on it.
Also burlap would look good.
I was thinking about this sand colored burlap, or this more ivory colored burlap, but I went
with this by Sunbrella.
Okay, so you’ll want to start by cutting a piece of fabric bigger than the frame by
about two or three inches all the way around.
Maybe even four inches to be safe.
So you see this has got plenty of extra fabric to wrap around.
Once that is cut you can take the frame apart.
You can hold on to some of this.
You might want it to help fill up the frame and make sure everything’s tight in there.
And keep this part, too.
(Background: Jane cat meowing) So optional is you can just run a glue stick
over the front to try and hold the fabric down, a little bit.
Mostly you’ll be holding it with the hot glue gun.
But this will help because you have to pull the fabric really tight or else it ends up
looking baggy in front of the frame.
So with the front side of the fabric facing forward, kind of center the fabric on there.
Then you can lay this into the frame.
And it doesn’t have to be perfect, but just try and make the lines even…level.
So you can see right out of the gate that the fabric is puffy, so that’s why we’re
going to be hot gluing it and pulling it really tight so it lays flat.
So this, the mat that comes with your frame or any kind of cardboard backing, is nice
to add in here to help tighten everything up.
And this is what I’m going to glue the fabric to.
So I’m going to warm up my hot glue gun.
If you’ve ever upholstered anything, this is kind of like that.
You’re just going to pull the fabric as tight as you can, and just instead of stapling
you will hot glue each section at a time, and keep pulling.
So I’m going to start with the center on both sides and just do a big dab of glue.
And try and watch that the lines stay level.
Pull really tight, just not so tight that you break the glass.
Now I’m going to do the top and bottom.
Okay we can check…so it is starting to flatten out.
That’s good and we have a ways to go, so that’s good, it’s already looking a lot better.
Try and pull really tight around all the corners.
Okay let’s do some opposite corners.
Okay let’s do these corners.
And at any point you can cut some of this extra fabric back if you want.
But it doesn’t hurt to leave it because it’ll help fill in the frame.
But just if it’s in your way.
All right, check that.
All right, getting close.
Now I’m just going to go through and start gluing down some of these sides.
Okay so that looks nice and smooth and ready for the next step.
So I’m going to just set these things back in here to try and hold everything tight.
All right, good.
So now we’re going to decide where we want to put our cats.
It might help to compare with the other frame.
You could use a ruler if you want to measure distance.
So you just need to mark approximately where the body is and where the head is.
I ended up using hot glue to attach the cats to the fabric on the frame.
Use a swirl of glue around the back of the cat bodies and heads, making sure to stay
away from the edges, then carefully press them in place.
The good thing is you can always scrape and sand the glue off later if you want to restore
the art to its original look.
Great, so that is all it takes to make this mid-century cat wall art.
Now we have a full set of cats to hang on the wall in the dining room!