Pearl Letters

I love monogrammed things- but I hate the stupid "letter wreaths" that you see all over the place. to me they always look cheesy and country-bumpkin. Well while I was on pinterest I found this

 amazing looking letter- but there was no tutorial to be found- So I decided to make it up. There's a few things I would have changed about mine- but I'll cover that as we go.

I got my letter from Micheal's Craft, I wanted something really big, so I got the biggest letter they had, which ended up being something a whole lot more 2D then the one in my inspiration. If I were to do it again, I'd get the more 3D one, even if it meant my letter would be smaller. Also, the inspirational letter  was painted gold before hand. I skipped that step, but I think I would have been happier with my result if I hadn't.


For my letter I used hot glue. I found that this worked better than any of the other epoxy i had, though I ended up using a LOT of glue.

I tried two different methods of attachment. First I tried neatly arranging the pearls, and then I tried just scribbling glue onto the letter and dropping the pearls on, letting them stick however they wanted to. I liked the scattered look better- but as I got closer to being done it left some blank spaces that I didn't like. I think it would have been ok if my letter had been painted gold








I got my pearls at Micheal's at well, and if I decided to do this again- I would get a better variety of pearl with a wider range of colors.

Once all the pearls were glued on, I went ahead and colored the edges gold using a sharpie and a gold leafing pen. In retrospect, even if I didn't paint the letter (which I still think would have been better), I should have done the edges first. I kept accidentally nicking the pearls, or struggling to color over some excess glue- or worst of all, knocking pearls off.

 Once I had gone all the way around, I flipped the letter over and hot glued some ribbon onto the back so I could hang it.

 

 I trimmed the ribbon up, and tada.