After a day of Line Art, we were ready for some String Art!
We found this tutorial on Instructables. It suggests using cork board for the backing, linoleum nails, and embroidery floss. We had no luck finding linoleum nails, but did come across some short gold nails at Lowe's that worked nicely.
Ginny and I got to work with some letters we printed off for templates. Jack decided to "freehand" his design. I found that the font I chose was say too skinny, so I switched to some parabola art instead. We all found that the little gold nails needed a good push to break through the cork board, so our thumbs got rather sore!
After much mumbling and grumbling, Jack finished his first. His string kept getting away from him and that annoyed him quite a lot. But he wouldn't take any help! Just bulled through and got the job done. It's a simple picture, but very nice!
Ginny hasn't gotten hers finished yet, but she had a whole bunch of letters to work on so that will take a while. I made the purple parabolas on the right above and finished that off with a duct tape border. Then I decided to try to paint the cork board. I thought the purple just didn't show off very well against the brown background. The center one is the painted one (of course!) and the colors really pop. I didn't get to finish that design as I ran out of nails. We will make a trip out to Lowe's some time so that I can finish that up and do a couple more designs. I really like this string art!
We got these cork tiles to work with from Hobby Lobby. They come 4 to a pack. I glued 2 together to make a thicker board using wood glue. (Somehow I never have the correct size glue sticks for the glue gun that I own, but wood glue worked great!) Our boards were actually 12" x 12", so I cut them up into smaller pieces using an exacto knife. The three projects in the picture above were made on 6" x 6" pieces. Ginny is working with a 6" x12" piece. These cork boards were also very easy to paint. The Instructable notes that some warping occurred after their board was painted, but I had no trouble with mine.
Some final thoughts about this project: The cork is definitely easier for kids to work with than wood would be. And it goes pretty quick too. But there is still a rather high level of frustration. So, I came up with an idea that should work well for even younger kids! I will post about that in a couple days...with templates!
Off topic note: Saturday was my birthday and google had a nice message for me! That was a fun surprise! I also received my copy of Exploding Kittens from Kickstarter that very day. It is awesome! And really gross. We had friends over so we were able to play several rounds of ExKittens, Roll for It! and Werewolves. My birthday was a blast!
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