Do you like your décor to be bespoke with personal touches? Creating little design accents that reflect treasured memories and glimpses of our life tend to do exactly that. I usually prefer creating fine art pieces and sprinkling them around the house. But, I also like creating nifty DIY items that require learning a new technique or craft. Keeping the learning curve up while having fun, not bad right? Here’s how the idea for this string art came about.
I had been looking for some new craft to learn and found this really cool technique of using strings to create interesting designs. Also, the other day I was going through the baby videos of my son and was really surprised! Because among all the sweat and tears (both mine and the baby’s), feeding, cleaning and lack of sleep, what shone through my memory was his angelic smile and how it made my heart go all mushy and awww. 
It sparked the idea for a décor accent for my kid’s room that would be a reminder of what actually lies beneath all this ‘why-there-is-no-handbook-for-bringing-up-kids’ mess 🙂 .
Which string art are we making:
String art nursery/kids’ room accent 
What do we need:
Rectangular piece of wood about 12 x 24 inches, iron nails, hammer, acrylic or any type of paint (even nail paint would do), strings, scissors, glue, pencil, paper, sticking tape
Got everything? Let’s get started then:
- Clean the wooden board with a dry piece of cloth and decide on the message you want to write.
- Either use free-hand technique or select some calligraphic font if you are feeling particularly artistic. Make the fonts big enough to be visible from a distance and also manageable with a paintbrush.
- Go crazy with paint on the letters. I used acrylic paint because it was handy, but you can use any sort of paint that you feel comfortable working with.
- I also sprayed a protective layer of art-grade spray to protect it from any liquid that decides to get splashed on it later on. After all, it is for the kid’s room where anything can happen, right? However, if you are using water-resistant paint, you can do away with this step.
- Now, comes the design part. You can either opt for a printable design, which are easily available online or you can create one of your own. Remember to customize these for string art. Which means that make sure they are manageable enough to be filled with stretched string and not too detailed if it is your first attempt. Tape this on to the wooden board.
- Mark the positions where you would be hammering in the iron nails.
- Hammer in all the pins and tear the paper off.
- Remember to tidy up the knotted ends with glue. I decided to shimmer up the edges of the board with silver tape, but you can decide to leave it natural.
- Starting from one corner, tie the string to one of the nails and make your way through the rest of the design. It would be a nice idea to first make a sort of outline with the string and then fill it up. This would give a clean look to the whole thing. And…you are done. All that remains now is to find the perfect place to show it off!
Involving kids in the project can create new memories adding more personal significance to your décor items. Though I feel the calligraphic writing gives a bit polished and professional feel to the piece, you can also choose to do away with it for smaller projects. String art is versatile and can be placed anywhere in the house created with different themes. Have you tried using string art to express your creativity? Which new craft technique have you recently explored?
This article first appeared as a guest post on April Does That.
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