It's SO nearly Christmas! If you couldn't tell from my consistently festive tweets and instagram posts, I'm just a *tad* excited. My excitement has been slightly delayed this year because of the amount of work I've had for the course over the past few weeks, which has seriously dampened my spirits, however now it is all done and dusted, the excitement and festive crafts are in full flow! I saw the idea for this on Pinterest quite a while ago and I'm not sure who thought of it first, but regardless, I instantly fell in love with it. After putting the tree up, I realised that the fireplace was in need of some festive TLC and remembered this lovely little idea. I'm forever wishing it would snow during the christmas period, and as it's looking less likely this year than ever, 'Let It Snow' seemed like the perfect quote for me to include.

1. Using the pencil, draw out a festive phrase on the canvas in a stylish font. As I wasn't too fussed about my lettering being perfect, I just drew 'Let it snow' out freehand. If you are keen for yours to be more accurate and more evenly spaced, you could always type out your festive phase in Microsoft Word, print it out and trace it onto the canvas.

2. Mix up the acrylic paints to make your desired background colour. As any reader of ISOSCELLA will by now have realised, I love mint/pastel blues/duck egg blue and all variations of them. Typically then, I mixed up a pastel mint shade using my Daler-Rowney Acrylic Paints in white, green and blue.

3. Leaving the lettering blank for the moment, paint all over the canvas. Using a large paintbrush (one you might use for your walls!) I painted all over the canvas, keeping my distance from the lettering in the middle. I then went in with a smaller paintbrush and carefully painted in between and all around the the lettering.

4. Mix up the acrylic paints to make your desired lettering colour. For me this didn't take very long or involve much thought as I simply used white acrylic paint, straight from the tube!

5. With a smaller tipped brush, carefully paint the lettering. Here, I used two smaller paintbrushes, one flat paintbrush and one much finer pointed tip paintbrush. For the wider parts of the letters I used the flat paintbrush and for the extremely narrow parts of the lettering I used the fine brush.

6. Using the pencil, mark where you want the lights to come through. Again I did this freehand and quite randomly (snow doesn't fall very precisely after all!) but just ensured that I made no more than thirty-five marks, as I had thirty-five lights.

7. Push a sharp utensil through these marks & widen with the scalpel. For this I used a sharp screwdriver however you could easily use a wide needle or pin, etc. Using a scalpel, I then widened each hole slightly as my holes weren't quite large enough to push my lights through.

8. Turn the canvas over & push the fairy light bulbs through each hole. Once the holes were large enough and I'd ensured that I could get a fairy light bulb through, I pushed the rest of the lights through.

9. Pushing the bulbs slightly further through, dab superglue around the bulb base & stick to the front side of the canvas. Because the bulbs were wider than the base of the lights, the lights were slightly loose and didn't sit at a 90 degree angle to the canvas. To resolve this, I pushed the lights up, dabbed superglue around the base and pushed the bulb down until it was fixed to the canvas at the angle I wanted.

10. Sellotape the battery pack & any uncontrollable wires to the back of the canvas. There were a fair few out-of-control wires (and a few unused lights!) and so to prevent them from sticking out I sellotaped them to the back of the canvas at the bottom.

... then, place your canvas, turn on the lights & enjoy!