Not as easy as it looks- DIY Fabric Letter

I have read countless tutorials about how to make fabulous DIY things for the home.  The creator explains the steps which are accompanied by pictures.  They usually make it sound so simple and cost efficient.  Well this is not one of those posts.  First of all, I do not have the "complete a step and then take a picture of it" mind set yet, and two, this was not easy.  I messed up... a lot.  At one point I threw it across the room.  It took me four tries to get it right.  Now when I say right, I mean you can look at it from far away and it looks pretty good.  So here it goes.

Attempt 1:  The first mistake I made was ignoring all of the tutorials I read.  I thought that I had the fool proof easiest plan in my mind so I started with a wooden letter "Z,"  some fabric that I ordered from babybedding.com, some batting, and a staple gun.  All I would have to do is wrap the fabric around the letter and staple, right?  Wrong!  the staples wouldn't go into the letter, the fabric was a mess, it took me all of two minutes to realize this was not going to work.

Attempt 2: So I decided to take a different approach.  I bought glue.  I went to the glue isle and bought the first glue that said wood and fabric on the back :) I traced the Z on the batting, cut it out and glued that to the top of the Z.

 I then traced the Z on to the back side of the fabric and cut it out about an inch outside of the line i drew.  Unfortunately, the "Z" that I cut out of the fabric was facing the wrong way.  The chevron pattern was on the back of the fabric when it was covering the Z.  UGHHHHH.  Fail 2.

Attempt 3:  Ok, i can do this.  I cut the fabric correctly this time.  Then I started to wrap the fabric over the edge.  I used a foam brush to apply the glue to the wood and then folded the edge of the fabric up.  Most of this was easy except for the curves on the inside of the "Z."  Not fun.  I cut small"v" shapes out of the fabric at the curves to help the fabric to fold up.  The only downfall with that is that the fabric did not cover all of the wood underneath.  Glue, fold, glue, fold.  Eventually I was done...... and it looked like crap! (this is when I threw it)

Attempt 4:  Repeat all of the steps above, a little more carefully.  I then glued some ribbon around the edge to hide some of the icky spots.

 And there you have it.  It took a little longer than the 20 minutes the tutorial boasted about, but I think it will look cute hanging in my niece's nursery.

He loves it.  Can't you tell :)