String States

Another great project I found on Pinterest. I've seen these before and always wanted one for myself but never really got to it. Till my husband pushed me in that direction. We went to the craft store and ordered a few pieces of wood and we went from there. How about I show you how huh?

What you'll need...

          *As many boards as you want to make. 12x12 is a good size. about 3/4 in. thick.

*Whatever color paint/spray paint you want your board to be.

*1 inch to 1 1/2 inch Nails

*Whatever color string you want. (i dont know exactly what kind)(the kind pictured.)

*A printout of whatever state your gonna do. Sized to fit.

*And of course a hammer.

Now here come the instructions. Dont worry there are pictures. :)

Once you have your board, grab whatever you are using to paint this bad boy and get to it. 

I had some handy help from my lovely husband. Let it dry overnight.

Here they are all primed up for me. With spray paint, it didnt cover the wood as perfectly as i hoped. It was a difficult kind of wood. lol

After you get your desired color, get that printout of your state. 

Make sure it fits nicely with room on all sides.

 Here I did Wisconsin and Florida. 

Also cut out a shape for a focus point. Like a heart, star, circle...etc.

I added a heart for where Brian and I grew up.

Now the fun part! Hammering in the hundreds of nails! Yay...

So just nail in around the state to make an outline. (I had to do it inside of the state for size reasons)

WARNING:

 *It does get messy with the nail rubbing off onto your hands and the board.(You'll see what I mean later)

*If you are going to be nailing on the floor, like I did, you may want to take breaks. I hurt my back just from being in the sitting position for so long. (Icy Hot helped a ton!)

Here is what it looks like after your all done adding the nails and you tear off the paper. 

See I told you it was messy. Stupid nails. lol

I was going to paint it again anyway.

I painted them again to get rid of the ugly marks and set them on our patio to dry overnight.

Guess what I woke up to...

RAIN. 

I thought to myself, "Are you fracking kidding me?!"

So I rushed to go get them. Nothing happened to them. 

The tops of the nails had rusted due to the H2O...

But I think it made it look even more awesome in the end!

 The rusted nails! lol Cool huh? Well anywho, after you I let them dry, I grabbed my string.

I picked a starting point and tied a knot to that one nail. I then just connected them to the heart by looping the string around individual nails. Some were used many many times again. Thats what caused the more dense areas. But keep doing that till you are satisfied with how it looks and tie it off on the last nail like in the beginning. Now, this part could get tricky. You may need to start over once in awhile but its quite easy. 

You get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Here are my finished products. Great right!

The next thing I gotta do is find some hinge thing to hang it up. You know the teeth like things that are on the backs of frames. lol Gotta search for those out here in Japan. haha 

And then find the perfect spot to hang these beauties. Hmm,...

And so that was my favorite project (so far) that I found on Pinterest. I will definitely search and complete more of course! But until then, im just going to go pin crazy! 

Have a great day everyone! 

Nikki P