It’s a two-for-one project day – well, sort of.

Ever since we took down our Christmas decorations, I’ve been wanting to spruce up our “every day” decorations, particularly the mantle. It’s never been bare – we have lots of different things we’ve kept on the mantle through the years – but I think it just needs a little updating.

I’ve been thinking about something to do with our initials. Everyone in our house has a name that starts with M or N. I found this tutorial on Pinterest that uses cardboard and thought I’d give it a try.

I started with some of my cardboard collection. I measured about how large I wanted the letters, and I set to work sketching them out.

Molly wanted to help me out – she felt entitled, considering her name also starts with M.

Now, I love good typography, but I’m no expert. As you can see, it took several tries to get the lines right.

I used an Exacto knife to cut out the letters.

I placed them up on the mantle, just to get an idea of how they would look.

I wasn’t sure I liked the yarn idea any longer, so I painted them with a coat of gesso just to see them in white.

I don’t like them in white, but the yarn I picked out is an off-white, creamy color, and being wrapped in yarn would give the letters some texture, so I moved forward.

Using a hot glue gun, I carefully placed the end of the yarn around the bottom left side of the N. I continued gluing and wrapping until I got to the top. I flipped the letter around and repeated the technique on the other side.

After I filled in the middle section, I made sure all the ends were glued down securely. I placed in on the mantle to check it out. I like it, but while I was wrapping, I had gotten another idea that I thought I might like better.

I went through my fabric stash and found all my large lengths of felt. Out of forest green, heather oatmeal, and gray, I chose gray. I placed the letter M between two rectangles of the felt and pinned them together.

Then I used my sewing machine to stitch completely around the M. I used scissors to cut all the way around the seam, leaving about 1/4″ allowance.

And here’s the Divine Miss M.

I place both letters on the mantle to see which is better. I like them both, but I’m undecided. I can’t help thinking the M looks a little like those 80’s bubble letters that kids had on their walls that spelled out their names, only in a more sophisticated gray wool and a cleaner font. I ask Husband. “I like my letter best because it’s bigger.” That doesn’t help much. So I’m going to live with them both for a few days and see which one is better. Then I’ll make another cardboard cut-out of the other one and make them match.

I’ve got a couple of other mantle/fireplace projects I’d like to finish this month. I want to be PURPOSEFUL about actually completing projects I find on Pinterest and not just collecting them in little virtual file folders forever. Stay tuned!

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This post is part of a 31 Day series about improving my days by being more PURPOSEFUL.

You can read more about it here. You can find all the posts in this series here.