How to Make String Art

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

When I was a kid, we had a couple of pieces of string art, made by an aunt, framed and hung in our house.

I mean, it WAS the 1970s, the heyday of string art.

But whereas the 1970s craze was all about making a string art owl from a kit (which we had), or a string art sailing ship, also from a kit (which we had), you can now do quite a bit better.

A lot of the imagination that you can bring to string art now comes from how simple technology is to use. Can you imagine what my aunt could have created if she'd had access to clip art and a printer? Google Images? A Cricut?!?

Because I promise you that designing your piece is by far the hardest part of making string art, and even that isn't hard. I know you've got access to Google Images and a printer, after all!

So no more kits for you! I'm going to show you how to make string art the completely DIY way--from scratch, by hand. It's going to be awesome. Here's what you need:

Tools and Supplies

• Wood, cut to size. I can always find some scrap boards to cut down over in my Garage of Mystery, but other good sources of wood are Craigslist, Freecycle, or your local Restore. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to score a finished plaque!
• Nails. For this particular project, I'm using 1 1/4" ring shank underlayment nails. They're a little thicker than you need, but I'm doing this project with kids, and that extra width helps them keep their grip. Feel free to use whatever nails you like and have on hand.
• Embroidery floss. This is another supply that you might just find that someone you know would LOVE to give you. There are a surprising number of people in this world who've given up cross-stitch!

Directions

1. Prepare your wood. This step can take a lot of different forms, depending on what wood you choose and the tools you have available. You can use everything from a pre-finished plaque to a pallet board, but whereas that pre-finished plaque is ready to go, but also pricey and unsustainably sourced, something like pallet boards or scrap wood might need to be cut to size and sanded down, but they're free and keep more resources out of the waste stream.

If you're preparing your own wood, don't skip sanding it--if this is one of your first woodworking projects, you'll be surprised at how much nicer your wood looks after it's sanded. My secret trick is to round the edges of the wood piece while I'm sanding it. It won't replace the services of a router, but just sanding all the edges makes the finished piece look more professional.

Staining and sealing the wood is optional, but if you choose to do so, remember to use water-based stain and sealant.

2. Create your template. Create a template for your string art on typing or notebook paper. You can draw freehand, of course, but Google Image is also your friend, and I love using my old-school Cricut. I mean, it can draw me a parasaurolophus at the size of my choosing! How AWESOME is that?!?

3. Nail directly onto the template. Place the template onto the plaque, and then begin to hammer nails right through the paper, following the lines of the template.

Try to keep your spacing and the nail heights even, but don't stress out too much. The one thing that you DON'T want to do is pull a nail out and leave an empty hole. Just work with where you're going!

Watch, as well, for narrow spacing. You can see above how I modified my parasaurolophus, as I noticed while I was hammering nails that some of my spacing--the tail, for instance, and certainly the legs--was going to be too narrow to look nice when wrapped with string:

Try to remember, though, that nobody is going to be looking at your project as closely and critically as YOU are, so roll with any imperfections that come along.

Once you've hammered in all the nails, tear the paper away. I had to get into a few little nooks with a pair of tweezers, but it wasn't difficult.

4. Wrap with embroidery floss. Now for the fun part! Wrapping the nail art with embroidery floss is the MOST fun, and you'll find that even kids who are too young to hammer nails (although don't dismiss their abilities without really thinking about it--you'd be surprised at how young a kid can handle a hammer!) can have a ball wrapping nails with yarn or embroidery floss.

Tie a knot around one nail (secure it with a little white glue to be safe), then wrap the floss around the perimeter of your piece to outline it. Weave in and out of the nails, wrap it completely around some nails, take a break to go back and forth across your piece--feel free to have fun!

Once the perimeter is wrapped, go back and forth across your piece at every angle, with no discernible pattern, to cover the surface area with embroidery floss. After a bit, you'll be able to notice spots that have gaps and you can easily cover those. This takes a LOT of embroidery floss, so be prepared to use at least an entire skein, and possibly more, depending on the size of your piece. Tie the floss off around a nail, and again, dot the knot with a little white glue to make sure it holds.

When you're finished, you can continue to embellish your piece (not everyone I know is as science literate as I am, so I made a label for my string art parasaurolophus), and mount a picture hanger on the back so that you can hang your new masterpiece in a place of honor.

And now you can make another one as a gift for someone else!

Work in Progress: DANCE

 
 
 
All I need now is to acquire some ribbon someplace or another, and my little dancing girl will have a tidy place to keep her tights, leotard, and ballet shoes.

Because What Etsy Needs is Another Pinback

Obviously, you've just been dying for me to tell you something else fun that I can do with my Cricut. Ooh, and if I can photograph it using selective focus, then all the better, right?

Um, right?

Here are some one-inch pinback buttons that I've been playing with, using my Cricut and various images cut at 3/4", backed with 1" circles punched from vintage dictionary pages. I gave some of these out for my five friends giveaway, and some others are up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:

Tree without Leaves

Dinosaur
Skull and Crossbones

Butterfly

And those were just the cut-outs that I liked in that size from the Paper Dolls Dress-up Cartridge. Just wait until I try out a cartridge like Animal Kingdom, or 50 States.

In other news, my belly is currently full from homemade quesadilla (it's Sunday, so I had to talk Matt down from his personal little tradition of two cheap frozen pizzas, but it was worth the effort), and later I plan to hit Goodwill in search of vintage T-shirts. An awesome good day, right?

P.S. Check out my tutorial for a matching game made from your own artwork, over at Crafting a Green World.

Tiny Little Cricut Cut-outs

Can you guess what project I need these teeny-tiny little Cricut cut-outs for?
Hint #1: They're all from the Paper Doll Dress-Up cartridge, and they're all cut at 3/4".

Hint #2: Here's what they look like using selective focus:

Hint #3: If you know me on Facebook, you might have seen me update about a corollary to this project today.

Hint #4: They're for my five friends.

If you're the first one to guess it, I'll give you one, too!

Bambi on Paper: A File Folder Playset

What's the use of having a ridiculously elaborate crafting toy, if you don't find an excuse to play with it nearly every single day?

I've enjoyed making a few of these file folder games for the girls, and although they haven't been often played with yet, the girls tend to go through phases of what kinds of activities they enjoy. Whereas a few months ago they did worksheet after worksheet and activity page after activity page throughout the entire day, lately they've been going through a renaissance of playing out wildly imaginative dramas with each other and their menagerie of toy animals. The time for zealous playing of file folder games will come again.

The girls have been enjoying using Cricut die cuts as characters in their imaginative play, however, so I thought up a combination of file folder game and pretend toy, and came up with this file folder playset from Bambi, which we're currently reading at bedtime (well, we forgot to bring it with us on vacation, so we're currently reading a Magic Schoolbus chapter book at bedtime, but Bambi will be waiting for us upon our return):
I cut blue scrapbook paper for the background on both halves of the file folder, and I cut in cardstock and more scrapbook paper several kinds of trees and bushes and grasses, and several kinds of animals, from the Animal Kingdom Cricut cartridge. This is a Bambi playset, so I focused on the animals that we've met in Bambi so far--three fawns, two does, two bucks, and squirrels, butterflies, and birds.

The background and all the foliage is glued to the file folder--I tried to make a woodsy area and a meadow, and I put a few smaller trees towards the back for some perspective, but overall choosing the correct size for each of these elements was by far the hardest part, especially those dang roomy trees. Stapled to the front of the file folder is a 4"x6" manilla envelope, where the girls are meant to keep all the parts of the playset.

I also used the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge to make labels for the main characters in Bambi, labels that Willow enjoyed using in her playset:
Sydney greatly enjoyed spinning out delicious yarns in her playset, but I learned from her that I need to make all future playset characters from cardstock, not scrapbook paper, because scrapbook paper is only printed on one side. Look how destroyed she is that she can't figure out how to make the deer she's holding face the same way as the other deer:

Of course, there's also a good math lesson in that, I suppose.

The Logic of How Things Sometimes Suck?

Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?