Tatum's String Art...

So we are expecting our second little one in a  few days and are finishing off some loose ends before her arrival, including the reveal of her nursery. As part of that post I wanted to share one of my Pinterest projects that is definitely a standout feature in her nursery!

I decided to take on the feat of string art based on this pin I found on pinterest! It’s based off the below picture and blog post on VintageRevivals.com.

I “loved” how she put the text within the heart of the string art, so we mimic a very similar look with a tilted heart and instead of the word love, we put our baby girl’s name “TATUM.”

To do this we uses the following supplies:

• Plywood Board… a smoother texture wood so that you don’t see a lot of grain or texture behind the heart. Ours is pretty big, around 32X46?? give or take.
• White Spray paint. I went through about 3 cans!
• Nails with a flat top/edge (the quantity will depend on size of your art)
• Embroidery Floss (I wanted the gold appeal that we were going for in the room, so we used the gold embroidery floss) about 100 yards – they come in 7-8 yard sets so you’d need to figure what you need. I will say that the metallic embroidery floss was a bear to use as the strands tend to come apart easily.
• Gorilla Glue
• Mod-Podge Spray Sealer

So we started with a template that Paul (my amazing graphic design master) designed and taped it to the board as a template for placing nails. Once I hammered all the nails in, we removed the template and then spray painted the board and nails white.

Then it was go time with the string! I would knot the string to a nail and then randomly move and loop around other nails throughout the board staying outside the lines of the letters. That part is key! You have to stay outside of the letters otherwise you won’t see a name!

Obviously only being able to do 7-8 yards at a time I would glue with the gorilla glue, each knotted end of my string to make sure it stayed secure. Once the glue was dry I would trim the extra string left over.

Once I had gotten enough coverage throughout the piece, I then had to do an outline on the name as well as the entire outside of the heart. This definitely makes a difference in how well you can read the text as well as just defining the heart.

And the finished product turned out great! I would say my total time invested was about 12-15 hours and was able to complete it over a period of about 2 weeks in spare time. It’s not the hardest pinterest project I’ve ever done, but certainly not the easiest either! I was definitely cursing the string I had chosen… but after it was all said and done, I couldn’t be happier with the result! It’s definitely an integral part of our little girl’s nursery!

Stay posted as the nursery reveal is coming soon!!! 🙂