Who else thinks yarn wrapped letters are as cosy as they are charming? What if I told you they can also be practical as well as beautiful? Keep reading to find out how to take your DIY yarn wrapped love letters up a notch by turning them into a dazzling clock.
Every day is “Love Day” in our house.
Love is in the little things like bringing each other cups of tea in bed in the morning. Cooking each other delicious dinners. Creating unique gifts to show how much we love and care about each other. And using beautiful home decor pieces to signify special milestones or things that mean a lot to us. Like displaying one of our wedding roses a la Beauty and the Beast or using our wedding colour scheme in our bedroom.
Our latest project is this charming yarn wrapped love letters clock.
It’s inspired by a clock we had in our last house that sadly didn’t survive the move. It was only a couple of quid after all. Our new clock is not only handmade, but it’s also inspired by our wedding colour scheme: midnight blue, ivory and gold, so it suits our bedroom perfectly.
This cosy craft also forms part of a Valentine’s Instagram collaboration we’re taking part in where a group of craft bloggers (including yours truly) share interesting craft projects and tutorials to celebrate “Love Day” coming up next month.
Wanna join in? Here’s how to make your very own DIY yarn wrapped love letters clock.
RELATED: Romantic Wedding Junk Journal Flip Through
DIY Yarn Wrapped Love Letters Clock
These next sections have all sorts of ideas and advice for your own yarn wrapped love letters clock project. But if you want to skip straight ahead to the exact steps we took, then you’ll find printable instructions at the bottom of this blog post.
Supplies
- Cardboard letters (L, V and E)
- Yarn
- Circular clock the same height as your letters (to use as your O)
- Sellotape
- Scissors
- Picture hooks
- (Optional) Extra embellishments
- (Optional) Hot glue gun
- (Optional) Sticky wall pads
Related: DIY Paper String Art Heart | Easy Embroidered Cards For Valentine’s Day
Wrap your cardboard love letters with yarn
Wrapping your cardboard love letters with your chosen colour of yarn is simple enough, but does take a bit of time to do. You’ll want to set aside a couple of afternoons to do all the letters.
We thought we’d go through more yarn than we did, so we ended up buying too much yarn. We bought two large 500g balls of wool to cover our 20cm high letters, but we only used about half of one ball. We even wrapped the ‘O’ afterwards to use up some more of the yarn! Still, better to have too much than not enough, right?
There are different ways you can wrap your letters with yarn.
1 | Cut and glue individual strips of yarn
Some people cut lengths of yarn rather than wrapping the entire letters — like in this example. This saves on yarn but will add considerable time to the project.
2 | Wrap the entire letter with yarn
We’re notoriously lazy crafters, so we chose to wrap all the letters in full to save us from having to cut individual lengths of yarn. Doing it like this does mean you might have to wrap some of your letters in several different directions to cover all sides, but this is likely still quicker than cutting strips of yarn before you even begin.
3 | Using one row of yarn vs. multiple strands at a time
You can wrap your letters one row at a time. This usually gives a neater and flatter finish but takes longer than wrapping your letters with multiple strands at a time.
It’s totally up to you. But to help you decide what’s best, here’s a close up of our ‘L’, which was wrapped one row at a time:
And here’s our ‘O’ that used multiple strands at a time as we wanted to do it quickly:
As you can (hopefully) see, the ‘O’ is a little chunkier and more rustic looking, while the ‘L’ is flatter.
I think both look good, so it’s all down to personal preference really.
4 | Solid blocks of colour vs. an ombre effect
You can also use solid blocks of colour as we did or even try an ombre effect, which can look really pretty.
Either way, once you’ve decided how you want to wrap your letters, you’ll need to secure the yarn to your letter before you begin wrapping it. We tried a few different ways to work out what’s best and easiest.
In the end, we think the easiest and cheapest option is best, which is to secure the end of your yarn to the back of your letter with sellotape.
Wrap your letter in full and then secure the other end of the yarn to the back of your letter. Either with sellotape again if you’re going to hang it on the wall, or by tucking the strip of yarn behind other strands at the back.
And finally, you don’t have to buy readymade letters. You could make your own as we did for our DIY beach decor project. We chose not to do that this time around because we were pressed for time.
Add your finishing touches
Once your love letters are wrapped in yarn, it’s time to add your finishing touches.
We went for heart embellishments, flowers and a dragonfly for ours. We even wrapped the rose on our ‘L’ with a bit of gold sparkly yarn to make it even more unique.
Before you secure your embellishments, though, arrange them on your letters to get the effects you want. If you’re anything like me, you’ll keep changing your mind, so best to arrange them before using glue.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes of me planning where the embellishments would go (and then I STILL made changes to the final version!)
Some embellishments might need glueing with hot melt glue, others (like flowers and their stems) can be tucked through the strands of yarn, while others could use sticky dots.
(Optional) Assemble your clock
While you could use any circular clock to go with your yarn wrapped love letters, you could also make your own.
Scott 3D printed ours using this tutorial from Thingiverse as a guide. He added the two love birds and rotated the flower pattern, so it almost looks like the birds are sitting on the flowers’ stems.
As we didn’t have the right colour plastic, I painted the clock to match our colour scheme using acrylic paints in blue and black.
It took a little bit of trial and error to get the right colour, but the final result is pretty spot on.
If you’re going to try this yourself, you’ll need to lightly sand the 3D printed clock, add primer and lightly sand it again (this time using damp sandpaper) before painting it.
Then you’re free to add a clock mechanism and hands, which are simply screwed into place with a washer and bolt.
Hang your finished love letters clock
You’re now ready to hang your love letters clock!
When we first put ours up, we used strong sticky pads just like with our DIY ‘Relax’ sign currently hanging in our conservatory. However, our love letters just did not want to stay up. Probably because yarn isn’t known for its ability to stick to things. Lesson learned.
In the end, we decided to go for standard picture hooks where we hung several strands of yarn on the back of each letter over each hook.
Once our love letters (and clock) were up on the wall, we thought it would look even better if we dotted some gold hearts around the outside of the letters – to really make it into a statement wall art piece.
We had some plastic hearts leftover from another project, so we spray painted them gold to match our colour scheme and stuck them to the wall with sticky pads.
Yarn Wrapped Love Letters Clock
Do you agree that yarn wrapped letters are as cosy as they are charming? What if I told you they can also be practical as well as beautiful? Here's how to take your DIY yarn wrapped love letters up a notch by turning them into a dazzling clock.
Materials
- Cardboard love letters
- Yarn
- Circular clock (either store-bought or 3D printed)
- (Optional) Extra embellishments
Tools
- Sellotape
- Scissors
- Picture hooks
- (Optional) Sticky wall pads
- (Optional) Hot glue gun
Instructions
- Wrap three cardboard letters (L, V and E) with your chosen colour of yarn.
- Add embellishments like flowers or hearts to your yarn wrapped letters if you desire.
- Assemble your clock if you're making your own to use as the letter O.
- Hang your letters and clock using picture hooks.
- Attach any other finishing touches with sticky pads, such as hearts surrounding your love clock.
Notes
For more detailed information on how to create this project, please see the additional advice in the blog post above.
Looking for more romantic crafts?
Did you like these DIY yarn wrapped letters and want to find other projects to help you celebrate Valentine’s Day? Why not try making one of these cute crafts?
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We hope you LOVED this pretty yarn wrapped love letters tutorial as much as we enjoyed making it and that it was full of inspiration for your own project.
If you make anything inspired by this tutorial then I’d love to see it, so tag me on Instagram @houseofmahalo!
Did you like this tutorial? Why not pin or bookmark it now, so you can make it later!
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