DIY Yarn-wrapped Monogram

I bought a monogram - this wooden letter A from Hobby Lobby for $3. I had always meant to cover it with fabric, paint it, or wrap it with yarn, but I never got around to it... Until now. I decided to cover it with yarn.

There are a TON of tutorials on Pinterest that you can choose to follow. I looked at a half a dozen, so I won't bother singling a few out from the goldmine available. I will tell you, though, that my first inspiration was from this photo. I didn't make the connection that this would be difficult if I chose a Serif font...

Some yarn-wrapped letters are wrapped vertically, some horizontally, and some with a mix of the two. I liked the look of horizontal lines on the finished product.

 

Here are the materials I used... except I didn't end up using the flower. After I finished the project, I realized I didn't want to embellish it with that specific flower.

 Something that the tutorials don't always mention is how tedious it is to pull a long piece of cut string through holes. You want to wad up the yarn to speed up the process.

 Then you pull it through the hole... Just be careful not to make a big knot out of it. I stopped wadding it when the string was a little shorter than the length of my arm.

 First I started with the vertical lines. You don't have to wrap the whole letter from top to bottom multiple times like I did. It would have saved a LOT of yarn if I had just cut and glued the yarn about an inch long along the edges where the vertical lines would show.

I'm sorry, I thought I took a picture between the last step and the next step. Oops! Now you get to see the finished product!

 Yay! Finished! After a FEW HOURS of wrapping. :D

The next picture shows what the bottom looks like...

 As you can see, I had to glue some yarn in odd places to make the horizontal lines look uniform throughout the A. I like the pattern it made.

 I love this aerial shot. :) It looks so nice and uniform!

 Front side... (Again I had to glue the yarn in a little pattern where the A has a diagonal slope, near the lower-right side of the base. See the pattern?)

 This is the back. Still looks pretty neat. :)

 This wasn't a hard project at all. It was time-consuming, like the lampshade project. But this one was far more enjoyable. Maybe it's because my baby was asleep whenever I worked on this... Or maybe because I love working with yarn. I'd give it a 2/5 because of the patience-factor of this project.

I NEED HELP! Do any of you have any ideas on how to embellish this letter? I'm thinking of making a few of these flowers (or ones that are similar) as a backup plan, but I'd love to get some input from you guys. So please leave a comment - help a girl out?