String Art

I have been wanting to post this for a while now, but I had to wait until I gave my friend her present or else I would have ruined the surprise. (Is it just me or do you get so excited about gifts you have found {or made} for a friend that you want to just give it to them right away?)

"String Art" (or at least that is what I am calling it) is something I have seen on Pinterest now for a while.  Every time I see it I think it is so cute and want to give it a go. With my friend's birthday approaching I finally thought to myself "Hey, that looks easy enough, maybe I could try it". (Last Easter Ryan and I tried our hand at Painting With Eggs, another Pinterest idea, and we had a lot of fun, so why not give it a go?)

Sources: Arrows/ Pineapple / Be Free/ Cloud/ Home Sweet Home

I didn't read any of the articles or even click on any of the links, but I got the general gist of the project from the pictures and decided to just wing it. We had the piece of wood in the garage (hubby is an artist and always has "canvases" for projects), I grabbed the string and paint from Michaels, and the nails came from Target (this was just for convenience sake since I was next door, you could probably find better {and cheaper} ones from a hardware store).

I started by painting the wood. I used an acrylic paint that went with my friend's color scheme in her house.

Then I had to decide on a design. I was originally thinking a "K" or "H" for her initials, but settled on a heart. I mean, who doesn't love love, right?!

I printed out an outline of a heart on the computer and made sure I liked the size of it compared to the wood. (I could have free-handed something, but wanted it to look perfect {or at least as close to homemade perfect as I could get it}.) Then I made marks every centimeter on the outline so my nails would be evenly spaced. I placed the paper on the wood and put two anchor nails in (one at the top and bottom of the heart) to make sure the paper would stay in place). Then you literally just hammer in the nails on the marks you made.

I would recommend trying to make the nails the same depth in the board so they are all the same height, but obviously with this being my first attempt and a homemade gift it might not have been exact.

With all of your nails set in place, you can now just pull off the piece of paper. Depending on the nails you used, you may want to do this gingerly. (My nails were pretty heavy duty so pulling the paper out did not move the nails at all, but the smaller the nails the gentler you may want to be when removing the paper.) My nails actually even left some of the paper (since you are hammering it into the wood), so I used tweezers to pull out the extra paper.

Next up is the last step - THE STRING! This step actually went really quickly so I didn't grab any process pictures. You tie one end of the string on a nail (I happened to pick the bottom point of the heart) and cut off the excess string. Then you just start stringing it from nail to nail. I didn't use any type of pattern, I would just look for an open nail somewhere across the heart and loop it around. Now some of the examples I saw looked very "dark", so I would assume they used the same nail more than once, but I only looped the string on a nail one time (I still wanted to be able to see the board and to be able to tell the string was individual pieces, not just a solid design - but this is all personal preference). I also went around the outside of the heart (like an outline) once I made sure each of the nails had a piece of string around it.

I am super excited with the way it turned out. Now that I know it can be done (and fairly easily), I am pretty sure I will probably be making more of these as gifts for friends and probably for around our place too ;)

What design or saying would you have on your string art?