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!

Thanksgiving in California: A Day in Joshua Tree National Park

I didn't photograph every single Joshua tree, but not for lack of trying.

Here's our first day in California--at the beach!
Here's our second day in California--in San Diego!

After leaving the dog beach in San Diego, we took the long drive to Joshua Tree National Park. On the way, we managed to eat at the grossest roadside restaurant that I have ever tasted--seriously, two of us couldn't even eat our meals, they were so gross--and we managed to see the grossest tourist site that I have ever seen. Salton Sea is foul, smells like death, and the children legitimately thought that we were going to die there, so that was pretty fun.

Oh, and this happened:

This is actually just a photo that I accidentally took as I was turning off the video feature on my camera as we were leaving a border patrol checkpoint. I'm just going to come out and say it: I am filled with righteous anger at the border patrol. I think they overstep their authority and contribute to the nationalistic, xenophobic mindset that's just a baby step away from Nazis in the streets. Back before the kids and I went to Canada we figured out (thanks to the ACLU) a strategy of noncompliance if we encountered them--no, I will not show you my driver's license. Am I free to go? No, I do not consent to a search of my car. Am I free to go?, etc.--but we thankfully didn't happen upon any during our trip, even though they were, indeed, blocking entire highways for hours at a time up in Maine where we were traveling.

But of course southern California is practically the axis mundi of Trump's nationalistic, xenophobic bullying, so of course the entire highway that we were on was shut down, cars at a standstill, for a border patrol checkpoint. 

Friends, I was loaded for bear. I was ready for noncompliance. Honestly, I was probably going to lose my temper, call the border patrol agent a baby jailer, and go to jail, myself, but whatever. If we can easily pass, it's our job to make big old donkeys of ourselves in order to inconvenience the baby jailers. The fact is, though, that we pass too easily. We're, like, the whitest Americans in America, practically. I'm the only one of us who isn't blonde! So the car hadn't even rolled to a complete stop when the border patrol agent peeked through the driver's side window and simply waved us on.

The car just in front of us, though? The drug sniffing dog started barking its head off at THAT car, it pulled off to the side, and the kids glued themselves to the windows to see what was going down as we passed.

Having accomplished practically every headache to be found in Southern California, we booked it towards Joshua Tree with the goal of stargazing that night. Unfortunately, as with the other National Dark Sky Preserve that the kids and I visited just a few months ago, it was too cloudy to see much, and we couldn't quite manage to navigate to a good stargazing spot. Still, we gave it plenty of effort, didn't completely freeze our buns off, I took this one photo that I actually like quite a lot:




That's me, without a tripod, using my car as a stationary object and failing to photograph Orion.

Fortunately, the next day was absolutely perfect. Just beautiful.

The bigger kid had been longing to see the desert. I think that an entire landscape of cacti will suit nicely!

There's for sure nothing blossoming back in Indiana in November!

My bigger kid is the worst person to hike with. As soon as you hit the trail, she takes off as far ahead as she can get:

Probably so she can sneak off and TOUCH THE CACTI!!!

Our first desert critter!

There are tons of short hikes to take and places to explore along the main roads through Joshua Tree. We hopped out several times to investigate:

The kids' favorite activity by far was scrambling around the giant boulders and hills:

And, of course, I photographed NEARLY every single Joshua tree in the park, or at least I did my best to!

All that climbing wore the kids out so badly that they were decidedly unenthusiastic about the mill hike that the adults wanted to go on (and to be fair, hiking through sand SUCKS!), but they slogged along with us anyway:

There are all these abandoned artifacts off the trail, just left where they are to weather and look picturesque:

We didn't actually die on the trail, although it kind of felt like we would at times, but instead we made it safely back to the ranger station, where the kids took their oaths and earned their Junior Ranger badges AND their Junior Paleontologist badges!

From Joshua Tree National Park, it was essentially a straight shot to Anaheim. But what's that off in the distance?

DINOSAURS?!?

Detour time!!!

Shockingly True Story: the dinosaurs are now owned by Young Earth Creationists, of all people, and you can go into the gift shop, look up and around, and see where they've tried to paint over the plaques displaying the succession of human evolution that the original owner created. We did that, but otherwise tried to ignore the rhetoric, and we certainly didn't give them any money! You can take all the photos that you want of these sweet babies for free!

I LOVE DINOSAURS SO MUCH!!!!!!!

Anyway, after we finally tore ourselves away from our sweet, sweet dinosaurs, we continued on our straight shot to Anaheim. We checked into our hotel, just a mile and a half walk from the entrance to Disneyland, and we went to bed early. Because it was the night before Thanksgiving, and the next day, Thanksgiving Day, we were going to celebrate the holiday in the most American way possible:

We were going to spend 16 hours in the happiest place on Earth!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Water Cycle at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Although it's been a while since we've been able to volunteer in the Paleo Lab, due to Victor's long illness and passing, I keep on the lookout for one-shot volunteer opportunities with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and as a whole it's been a rewarding strategy, as it encourages us to do things, primarily involving working with the young visitors, that we don't generally do in the Paleo Lab.

On this particular day, we were going to volunteer at the museum's After School Night, a special event just for children in various non-profit school-age programs around the city, and for the neighborhood's children (one of the best things about the Children's Museum is the deliberate interest that it takes in improving the quality of life of those who live in the surrounding neighborhood, an area of clear economic disparity compared to the rest of the city).

But of course if we're going to be in the museum anyway, we might as well go early to play!

And of course our first stop in the museum isn't even the museum proper, but the branch of the public library that lives in the museum:

How many other public libraries do YOU know that live inside a museum?

You might remember that we're doing a fast and loose meteorology unit currently, which means that we've been reviewing the water cycle. Remember our cloud in a jar demonstration?

It was just a happy coincidence, then, that most of our museum play happened to be related to that unit. First, as much as the kids miss the giant construction area that used to be in the old ScienceWorks exhibit, they LOVE the new, expansive water table, and they especially love it when they have it all to themselves!

Then, we timed it just right so that we were able to pop into a lesson in the SciencePort. These are always fun, but on this day, the theme was the water cycle, and the scientist had us play probably the funnest water cycle game that's ever been played (Incredible Journey, here). I especially loved this game because it dug into more than just the basics of the water cycle, covering how water is lodged in glaciers, in plants, in animals, in aquifers, etc.

The kids especially loved this game because it involved beads!

Okay, I especially loved this part, too, as you can tell when you see my own water cycle bracelet there at the bottom of the image. Every station had a different color of bead, and a die. You collected the bead for your station, then rolled the die to see where your water went next. At the end of the game, then, you had a record of everywhere your water had been. The die were loaded so that your water naturally went more often to the places where water more often is, so it was a surprisingly sophisticated model of the water cycle.

And yes, we did eventually get around to doing our actual volunteering:

By yet another happy coincidence, Dinosphere was the gallery of choice for After School Night, and we took over the perfect table for us, that of demonstrating and practicing with real paleontology tools. Well... the tools weren't *exactly* real, as you can't give small children clam shuckers and machetes and x-acto knives and Paleobond, but the experience was surprisingly close, and we were able to tell the children lots of additional details that we know from our experience at the dino dig. My favorite trick was to say, "Raise your hand if you've ever glued yourself to a fossil!" Will, Syd, and I would raise our hands, and all the children at our table would go "Wow!" and "Cool!" and "Awesome!" and such.

It was fun.

I always forget how stressful this month is until it sneaks up on me and smacks me on the head, so I'm always worried that the rigorous education that I try to stuff into my kids' brains suffers during this month, as I have more of my attention on the intricacies of Girl Scout cookie booth scheduling and Syd's Trashion/Refashion Show garment than on our weekly work plans. Days like this, however, reassure me. We didn't do math or grammar or review Greek and Roman deities, but we did listen to two hours of Al Capone Shines My Shoes, do some reading, review the water cycle, practice our pedagogy and people skills, and perform some service.

And I was home in time that night to rearrange cookie booth schedules, run the percentages for a Cookie Cupboard order, prepare a bank deposit to our troop account, and fall into bed with pizza, wine, a movie, and a heartburn pill.