Well, she’s up, sweet people. The mitten nail and string art I documented on instagram over the weekend is finally complete and is presently adorning my studio wall.
And may I just say…as nervous as I was to take this hammer-intensive project on…I nailed it.
See what I did there? Humor me and offer up a courtesy chuckle in honor of my smashed thumb and adolescent sense of buffoonery, would you?
I had seen this project circulate multiple times on Pinterest, but like most of the things I pin, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever actually get around to seeing it in the flesh. It’s that whole…”too much inspiration, too little time/resources/tools/motivation” thing.
But late Sunday afternoon, motivation struck me out of left field and I ran out to the studio to unearth the ugly tree picture (glued to wood – see below) I’d picked up at a thrift store for $1 many moons ago, grabbed my favorite avocado-hued spray paint, and hurriedly printed off a large map of Michigan (spread across two 8.5 x 11 pages).
For the next few hours my family watched and chuckled as I sprayed, cut and hammered like a man woman, whacking my thumb with every 5th stroke. I’m pretty sure by the time I wrapped up the lower peninsula, my children were cheering for their bedraggled mum as she attempted to take on the upper with a wrist that no longer wanted to lift a cup of tea, let alone a stupid hammer.
This project isn’t hard, per se. It’s just time and labor intensive. But then again, this will all depend on what you’re silhouetting…Michigan is a toughie, what with that beautiful coast line and upper & lower peninsula part.
So it may be wise to spread it across a few days. I knew, however, with the pain I was feeling in my wrist by the time I had made it through my overly accurate outline of the mitten (note to self: blur the shape a little next time), that if I were to have to repeat that same hammering action again the next day, I might never finish it.
So I gritted my teeth in a classic display of stubbornness and pushed through.
Impatient much?
The steps for creating NAIL & STRING ART are pretty simple:
1. Find your board {paint it, stain it or leave it raw}
2. Print out your shape, cut it and place it on your board (my spray paint was still a little tacky, so it kept it in place – but painter’s tape works well to secure it without removing paint)
3. Hammer nails around the border, and the inner heart, deeply enough to secure them (I used 1 inch nails)
4. Pull off your paper and admire the polka-dot effect of the nail border. Consider quitting calling it a day.
5. Tie your sting (I used embroidery thread) to an outer nail on your shape, and start wrapping back and forth between the outer nails and the inner heart, keeping in mind that the inner nails will hold more loops of thread than the outer. With the upper peninsula, I did a simple zigzag across the shape.
6. Tie the end of your string to either the same nail as you started, or one nearby, making sure all the spaces are relatively evenly filled.
I can’t show you that final product up on my wall without giving you a glimpse of the finished version of these ugly dressers we picked up at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore a few months ago.
I am in love with how they turned out.
One was cheap laminate (the 3 drawer, horizontal) with a slightly warped top, that we picked up for $17. The 6 drawer, tall dresser was solid wood and a little more moolah ($37). The little white piece you see in the back was a cheap $5 cabinet insert that we snagged to hold my printing supplies. It remains white.
When my parents found a place of their own (after occupying this office/guest/man cave space for almost two years, then renting from a friend for 4 months – leaving their stuff for me to fill up), they took all their furniture with them…and totally cleaned my new studio space out. This place was a disaster.
So we went on a hunt for cheap furniture I could refinish and fill with my supplies…
And here they are!
The green dresser was painted with left-over paint from our kitchen, turned into chalk paint with this easy method I used on our bedroom dresser. The blue dresser is that same beautiful blue I used on our bedroom dresser. I kept the old hardware because I loved how aged and antiqued they looked against the fresh paint.
These two pieces occupy the far corner I smile at from my desk multiple times a day, not only because having my stuff strewn across the place made me want to cry {organization is my friend}…but because these gorgeous shades of turquoise and avocado make me insanely happy!
~
Side note: I found my Michigan silhouette through Ancestry.com, and imagine you could find any state that easily. But if you’re creative and ambitious, you could silhouette anything. Anything. A word, an owl, your dog. Just picture your kid’s mug up in the hallway in stringed-profile loveliness!
Or try the totally random string version, which – aside from being uncomfortably out of the box for my OCD streak – would be absolutely fantastic.
Are you going to try it?
Share your finished product on Simply Bloom {Blog & Design}’s facebook page…I’d love to see what you come up with!
