I have been trying to finish this craft project for over a month! Sorry I haven’t had many crafts lately, but July into August was so busy with vacations, the kids keeping me busy while they were off from school during the summer… and then school started. I am just now coming up for air! I have some really fun fall craft projects that I will be sharing starting in September. I really get excited about crafting, decorating and DIY projects once Fall starts! This project all came about when I saw this scrap piece of wood in the garage. I know that happens to a lot of other crafters, but seriously… I knew I was going to stain it and come up with a nice and dandy string art project with it!
I just recently bought a gold deer head from Hobby Lobby that the husband just hung this last weekend (eeeek!). I had a lot of ideas for string art besides doing a deer head, such as the state of Missouri with a heart over St. Louis or even the Eiffel tower… But, the shape of the wood was perfect for a deer head and a little phrase on the bottom… so, I went with the all too popular ‘oh deer’ phrase of course!! Gotta love it, right?!
The phrase ‘oh deer’ fit perfectly on the bottom… I will admit, I was a little worried to string letters, but it turned out just fine! I think it really makes the whole piece!
We had some stain in our garage from when Brian stained our mailbox and from when we were going to stain our wooden bench on our porch (but, never did). However, these stains weren’t the color I envisioned for this project… SO, off to Lowes I went, which is almost up there with Target and Hobby Lobby when it comes to my favorite stores list! I went to the paint department and found a pint of transparent stain and selected a color from their chart. I wanted a dark wash, so I went with a darker stain. Seriously, this stain was the most expensive part of this project… $18 for a small can! BUT, I plan to use it again for something else… I hope. 🙂 Then I bought two packages of nails at $1 each, which was really cheap! I purchased larger headed nails for the deer head and thinner headed nails for the ‘oh deer’ phrase.
First, wipe down the wood with some paper towels and water and let it dry. Then, I set two small baby bowls under the piece of wood, so that I could paint the sides of the wood easily. I only painted one coat of the stain on the wood, because I wanted to wood grain to show through. It was a transparent stain and I could have probably done another coat, but I really liked how it looked after one coat. Then I let it dry for the rest of the day.
I printed out an outline of the deer head on my inkjet printer and used paint safe tape to adhere it to the wood.
Then start hammering your nails along the edge of the outline. This is pretty tedious and my hand got tired a lot. Also, a lot of the nails were really close while I was doing the antlers and it got to be a little tricky. But, ohhh, the end result is SO worth it.
Do the same with the letters, print out a template and hammer the nails over the lines of the letters.
I was wondering how easy the paper would be to pull off over the nails, but it came off really easy. You will now see all of the nails on the wood and you’ll notice how confusing the nails look around the antlers of the deer head! You will want to look at a photo of your outline while stringing, so you can remember what you need to string!
I should have taken a photo of this… but first you will tie a knot of the end of the string to one nail and then you’ll wrap the string in and out of the nails around the entire outline of the deer head first. After you’ve outlined it TWICE and outlined any negative spaces (you’ll need a small piece of string to do those areas), you can start stringing the entire piece. You will just go from one nail to the other and the string will eventually fill in all of the bare spots. I would wrap the string around the nail head one time before bringing the string across to the next nail. By wrapping it around the nail head, you secure it better then if you just wrap it along one side before going to the next nail.
For the letters, I would tie a knot on a nail and string around each letter for each word, cut and knot and then start over with the next word. I would outline the letters two times for thickness.
The string is not white, it is sort of a cream/light tan color. I thought this went really well with the color of the stained wood.
Here is a side view, you can see that I used a lot of nails for this project!
Now I am trying to decide what my next string art project will be… perhaps some small ornaments for my Halloween tree!
