Gold Chevron Army Backpack // DIY

Did ya miss me?

This week has been so busy! I moved into my new room for the summer, trained for my job, and started working! Thursday I went to the summer kickoff of RealLife, the campus ministry that I am involved in here at Ohio State. Then last night I went with some friends to a cool theater downtown to see the old movie Casablanca. 

Two very exciting pieces of news:

I was featured on one of my absolute favorite blogs, Cotton & Curls, yesterday! 
SO exciting. I looked on her blog and all of a sudden, my picture from the DIY Lace Shorts Tutorial was at the very top! I did a little happy dance and immediately called my mom and fellow crafting buddy Katie to tell them the great news.

I have also become the DIY Coordinator & Stylist for a website called Collegiate Consumption (see logo on the right sidebar!) which is also very exciting. I will be posting 1 out of every 3 or 4 of my DIY tutorials on there, but don't worry! Elemental Carbon will still be running as normal and you will always get the most and best right here.

Now that I've probably bored you to death with all my blabbing, on we go to this week's tutorial!

After a week off from blogging, I am more than ready to come back and show you what I have up my sleeve! I am SO excited for you guys to see this post.

Ready to see what we're doing?

A DIY Gold Chevron Army Backpack!

And this tutorial comes with a freebie downloadable chevron pattern!

I got this cute little backpack from an Army Surplus/Resale store that is close to campus. As soon as I saw it I knew it would look perfect with some chevrons on it. I was originally thinking silver, but I'm glad I changed my mind to gold.

Click "Read More" below to continue with the instructions!

Here's what you'll need:

-Gold acrylic paint PLUS Textile medium (I'll explain below) OR just gold fabric paint

-Backpack that you want to remake

-Paintbrush

-Painter's Tape (masking tape will work too)

Here's what you do:

1. Right click on the chevron image below. Copy and paste it into a Word document with the orientation of the document Landscape. Enlarge it to the size you want. You can make the chevrons more vertical or more horizontal, depending on your taste. Print out the pattern.

2. After you've printed out the chevron pattern, cut it out so that you have three pieces - the top, the middle chevron, and the bottom. Put some tape on the back of the pattern and then stick it to your backpack (or anything else you want to put chevrons on!) so that it stays in place. See below:

3. After taping down the pattern piece, start taping along the top and bottom edges. To do this, I recommend tearing off smallish pieces of blue painters tape (3-4 inches in length?) and cutting one edge at a diagonal with scissors to make a nice edge. Then start taping down along the edge of the pattern. This taping process is the most difficult part of the entire tutorial:

4. Continue taping until you have the entire pattern taped out:

5. To make acrylic paint work with fabrics, add a textile medium to it. My textile medium said two parts paint to one part textile medium. The paint and textile medium that I used are below:

6. After mixing the paint, paint it on between the painters tape! I did two coats, allowing them to dry in between. Once dry, peel off the tape and marvel at your masterpiece:

And you're done! Go show it off!

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"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing." 

-C. S. Lewis

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