Hello Creative Family Girlfriend’s Craft Night: DIY String Art Projects

Crafting is more fun when you are doing it with friends! Wouldn’t you agree? My friend Dee recently suggested that we should start having crafting nights where we get a group of girlfriends together and craft. I instantly loved the idea for a few reasons:

1. Mama needs a night out with girlfriends, away from the kids every once in awhile. 
2. It’s a fun opportunity to try out new crafts that I might not have tried sitting at home by myself. 
3. It’s fun trying out a new skill with a group of people. You can bounce ideas off of each other. Try different techniques to see which way turns out the best, and there are other people there to help if you get lost or frustrated with what you are working on. 
4. It’s so much fun to see how people can all start with the same materials and end up with completely different projects. 

Dee was kind enough to let me pick what we would make for the first project. While searching Pinterest I saw Rainbow Heart String Art that Mandy at Sugar Bee Crafts had made. I immediately fell in love with it, and since I’d been wanting to try string art for awhile I decided that this was the perfect opportunity. 

Lion Brand Yarn was kind enough to send us a huge box of their BonBons and Vanna’s Palettes. How pretty are all of these bright colors? These tiny balls of yarn are PERFECT for string art projects! It’s such a fun way to get a bunch of different colors of yarn that all coordinate without spending a bunch of money. The size of the balls of yarn are perfect for string art. Even the ladies at our craft night who did just one color of yarn, didn’t go through a whole bonbon!

At the beginning of the night we had all of the yarn laid out. I expected that we would all end up going for the same packages, but it didn’t happen! It was so much fun to see everyone pick out the package that most appealed to them and helped make all of our projects unique and one of a kind. 

We gave the ladies three choices of designs- a heart, a bunny or an Easter egg. We also gave everyone the option of doing the design as a negative (so that there are nails around the outside of the project and the yarn is strung between the nail “frame” and the design) or as a positive (so that the yarn is within the design). 

DIY String Art Project

Materials we used for each project:

-Lion Brand Yarn BonBons or Vanna’s Palettes

-A piece of wood that is 12 inches by 12 inches (I bought a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of wood at the hardware store and asked them to cut it into 8- 12 inch pieces for me.)

-Nails (we used Common 1 inch (2d) nails)

-Scissors

–Drill and drill bits (For the nails we used you need a 5/64 drill bit)

-Hammer

–Saw Tooth Picture Hangers

How we did it:

Step 1: Choose your design and either draw a template or find one online. I found a good way to find templates was to search whatever you were looking for with the word “silhouette” (for example bunny silhouette, dog silhouette, cat silhouette, etc.). 

Step 2: Place your template on the wood and using a pencil mark out where you are going to put your nails. You want to keep your nails pretty evenly spaced and you want to make sure that you have a nail wherever there is a corner or a turn. 

Step 3: Pre drill pilot holes for your nails to go into. This is going to make your job SO MUCH EASIER! It will ensure that your nails go in straight and save you a lot of the elbow grease of hammering all of those nails. I predrilled my holes so that they were approximately 1/4 inch deep. 

Step 4: Remove your template, grab that hammer and start nailing, putting a nail into each pilot hole. I’ve heard of some people leaving their template in place until the very end, and removing it from underneath the yarn. I think this would work well for a complicated design, but ours were all pretty simple so we opted to remove our templates first so we wouldn’t have to fight ripping the paper out from beneath the nails and yarn. 

Step 5: This part is the most fun! Pick a color of yarn, tie it onto a nail (I tied my yarn with three or four knots, I’ve read that some people put a dot of hot glue on each knot to keep it in place) and start stringing! This is where you get to make the project 100% your own! Some of us decided to use multiple colors, while others did just one. Some of us went “Zen” and let the decided how they wanted the yarn to criss cross from nail to nail as they went, while others pre-planned. Some people finished their projects by outlining their design with a strand of yarn, while other’s left it unframed. 

If you change yarn colors in your projects simply tie the yarn to a nail and then tie a new color of yarn to the same nail and keep going. When I was doing a color change I tied my first color of yarn to the nail with one or two knots, tied my second color of yarn to the nail with one or two knots and then knotted the two new colors of yarn to each other. This might have been overkill but I wanted to make sure it was secure and didn’t come undone. 

Step 6: Once you are done stringing the yarn around the nails, trim any loose yarn ends, add a dot of glue on the knots if you want them extra secure and then flip your art over and attach a saw tooth picture hanger to hang your artwork with! (I used the drill to pre-drill the holes for these too). 

Some of the ladies left blank space at the top of their art where they are going to add hooks to hang their keys from. 

The one thing I think I would change about our string art is having us paint the wood boards. I think this would have been a fun way to make them even more individualized. Since we were doing the whole project in one night we didn’t have enough time to paint, let the paint dry and then do the string art, but the next time I do this project I’ll pre-paint my board. 

That’s it! You’re done making your string art! 

Here are the finished designs from the 7 ladies who participated. 

Tell me… what kind of design would you make for your string art? Have you ever had a girlfriend’s craft night? What would you like to see our group make next?

Looking for more string art inspiration? Check out my String Art Inspiration post with inspiration for over 27 string art projects! 

Disclosure: Thank you to Lion Brand Yarn for supplying us with the yarn for our craft night. As with all posts on Hello Creative Family, all thoughts and opinions are 100% our own.