All Strung Up

The latest trend to hit the crafting world seems to be "String Art," and I just had to try it out for myself! When you browse Pinterest for ideas, there are thousands of design ideas that range from the very simple Monogram Letter all the way to three piece animal designs with a variety of different color strings. I'm usually very ambitious, but I figured I'd keep it simple for my first trial run.

I headed to Michaels with the intensions of buying a real wood plaque, an antique clip to hold a photo with room on the side for creating my string letter. I walked out with 3 MDF frames that encapsulated my vision, 6 spools of teal string, a light grey chalk finish paint, and paint brushes, all for about $25.00. That had to be the best Michaels trip I've had in a while! Although, I wasn't certain that the nails would work well with the MDF, I was going to give it a go. If by chance they didn't, I would just use my Silhouette machine to cut vinyl and place on the frames instead. It's a win-win, no matter how it turns out.

I ended up spray painting the frame white, then painting light grey stripes. I cut the letter J out of construction paper from my Silhouette machine and taped it on the frame once all the paint dried. From there, it was all hammers a-go! Placing the nails close to the paper and close to one another for a more defined outline, the nails seemed to stay put in the MDF board. Once all the nails were in, I carefully took the paper letter off and began to string away! With no direction set, I wanted to fill the area with as much string as possible for this project. If you do the research, there are many different ways you can string that will bring out a whole different design element, but I wanted to keep it simple this time around.

Once everything was in place, I printed out one of our wedding photos, but only had 4"x 6" paper. The frame was 5"x7", so I found some decorative paper that worked well with the colors and placed it behind my photo. I think this project was a complete success! I will take my time for my next frame, as I should have paid close attention to the bleeding paint on my stripes, but I was too excited to finish!