Handmade Decor: The Great TV Coverup!

This might be my favorite home decor project ever, and I can’t wait to share it with you!  As many of you know already, we moved into a new-to-us house this past fall, and we’ve been working since then on decorating it to make it truly ours.  We have a very limited decorating budget, so I’m doing my best to create decor as much as possible.  I love handmade things, so handmade decor works perfectly for us!  I thought I’d try to start sharing a handmade decor idea here on my blog once a week . . . at least until I run out of house to decorate.

That’s our TV wall above.  It’s one of the first things you see when you walk in our front door, and while my family enjoys owning and watching television, I don’t like having it on display when we have guests over.  I knew that we couldn’t really purchase a piece of furniture to hide the TV, so I went hunting for ideas to cover it up when we wanted to do so.  I found some great ideas on Pinterest, including several that balanced a canvas print on the television using brackets attached to the print.  I liked that idea because it’s simple and cheap, but I thought maybe I could take it a few steps further.

We started by mounting our television and pulling the cords into the wall so that they’re all hidden.  (I say “we”, but really, Ray did all of that work while I stayed out of the way!)  Once the TV was mounted, I checked all the measurements: length, width and depth from wall.  With measurements in hand, I went hunting for the perfect canvas.  I found that when you’re looking for a larger canvas, it’s usually less expensive to purchase one with a print on it rather than a plain white canvas.  The canvas that worked for us started out as an alphabet print from Hobby Lobby.  (I promise I took a before picture, but I have hunted everywhere and cannot find it.) On clearance, I paid $25 for the canvas.
I had this stack of quilt blocks that I pieced early last year during a quilt-along, a quilt-along that I failed to completely quilt along with.  That’s okay, though, because these blocks were ready and waiting and perfect for this project.  I measured everything out to determine the width that I needed for my sashing and a border wide enough to wrap all the way around the back of the canvas.  Once the quilt top was pieced together, I was ready to to assemble my “canvas quilt”.  Because the canvas print was pretty bright, I covered the canvas with white cotton fabric then stretched my quilt top over it and stapled it in place. I wanted the canvas to slide completely over the television, but the back  had some braces that needed to come out for that to be possible.  I called in Ray’s help again.  (I feel like I should add here that he was worried the frame might not hold it’s angles well without the support, but he was willing to saw out the supports as long as I knew that was a possibility.  Thankfully, the frame held together beautifully!) With that, this project was done!  Because you can see the TV from all sides in our home, I love that this cover mounts all the way over the TV.  It’s also really lightweight, so I don’t worry that it will cause any harm to the television.We had friends over last week, and late in the evening, someone asked me, “Do you own a television?”  She happened to be standing right next to it and had no idea!  Exactly what I was hoping for!