Stretching my own canvas

After playing around with the wonderful canvas material I got at Omer Deserres this Sept, I have finally been able to stretch my own today. The first painting I did was because I wanted to do some paintings for my 2 nephews in Texas but the shipping cost to send them stretched was too much. As it turns out it can be quite liberating to work on canvas that is not stretched. I have now worked on 4 and needed to be able to get up the nerve to try to stretch at least one. I did the first one back in Sept after checking out the instructions on You Tube. It wasn't so great. It doesn't have the nice little knocking sound that one should hear when you knock it. So I decided to get advice from my friend Dan and brought a couple of paintings that I needed done. He used a different stapler made by Master Craft which has the front end load. What a difference. Now that I learnt how to do that all I needed was the right tools, so off to Canadian Tire my hubbie went to get it for me. I spent 3/4 of the day cutting my material, stretching 5 canvases and then off course since I was already taking up the whole dining room table, I gessoed most of them until I ran out of gesso......yikes. I don't think I have used as much gesso as I have this year. Tonight just before dinner I started working on one of the smallest canvases but will probably not come back to it till sometime next week. I am doing some crafting with my favourite little neighbour Jasmine tomorrow who has a ped day and then Friday is crafting with the daycare group. I still have to figure out which is the best project for Friday, so maybe Jasmine can help me out with that tomorrow.