St. Patrick’s Day is such a beloved holiday in our area. The prominence of Irish culture is emphasized with so much in mid-March. In honor of that, I wanted to create a festive canvas as a nod to all of the St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
I absolutely love Irish blessings. There’s a beautiful saying that’s appropriate for everyone. For this canvas, I chose a simple but true blessing that would be applicable to almost anyone.
May Your
Blessings Outnumber
the Shamrocks
That Grow.
And May Trouble Avoid You Wherever You Go
For this canvas, I created a stencil with vinyl and cut it with my Cricut. Weeding the stencil, and ensuring I caught every single period and detail was probably the most laborious part of this project.
Once it was all weeded, I transferred the vinyl stencil carefully to the 8.5 x 11 canvas. This part was more tedious than anything else. The transfer tape that I used was a little too strong, so I struggled a bit. I would definitely recommend using a lighter tack transfer tape to get everything onto the canvas seamlessly. Be sure to burnish the vinyl very well to avoid any possible leaks or bleeds.
Once you’ve burnished the vinyl onto the canvas, select your colors and brush. I chose Dixie Belle’s Palmetto which is a beautiful deep, yet subtle green.
A palmetto is a fan palm tree, which is prominent in the southern U.S. And since we have our fourth Nor’Easter upon the horizon, making this feel like the longest winter ever, I have visions of warmth, sunshine and palm trees.
Palmetto was the perfect green for this canvas. I wanted the quote to be accented by gold, and to showcase the visual contrast in the fonts. Once I aligned the stencil, I took a smaller brush to lightly paint in the letters and shamrocks. For projects like this, less is always more. With each stroke, the shade gets a bit deeper, but be careful with overdoing the paint distribution. If you add globs at a time, the pain is more likely to bleed through the stencil and look sloppy. Small, light strokes works best for this canvas.
Since Dixie Belle’s paints dry with ease, just keep an eye on the canvas. I usually take the stencil off before the paint completely dries. When taking off the stencil, go slowly, just to ensure you don’t drip or create streaks with the semi-dry paint. It doesn’t take Dixie Belle paint to dry, so I was finished with this project in under 2 hours. I love how it turned out, and it’s definitely something I can keep up well beyond St. Patrick’s Day.
