DIY String Art Wall Decor – “Love” sign

Well, it has been quite some time since my last post.  Things have been quite busy since before Christmas – making gifts, family in town, birthdays, Girl Scout cookie sales (and eating!), work, and all of my daughter’s activities!  But, amongst the craziness, I was able to create a couple of small, quick projects to add some decor to my home.  The first of those projects was some string art wall art to hang above our bed in the master bedroom.  I purchased a new duvet cover (on sale, woo hoo!) right before Christmas and wanted to add some art to my wall to match the duvet cover.

My new duvet cover is white with a mix of blues and browns and I wanted a piece of wall art to match the colors of my duvet.  I did have a large metal candle holder above my bed, but it was all one color and I’ve had it for years, so I wanted something with a little more color and pizzazz! Here is what was hanging above the bed:

I of course went to Pinterest to search for ideas for DIY wall art.   I’m absolutely horrible at painting and drawing (even my stick people art is atrocious!), so a canvas art piece was definitely out of the question.  I did find several string art pieces though that grabbed my attention and looked like something I could successfully create!  Since the artwork was going to be hung above my bed, I wanted something romantic, so I decided to create a string art piece out of the word “Love”, with the L, V, and E traced and painted onto the wood, and then a heart for the letter O made of string art.  I had never tried string art before, so I wasn’t quite sure how successful I would be, but it was much easier than I anticipated, which is always a plus!

First, I cut five 1×3 boards to 30″ in length each.  I then used my Kreg jig to drill three 3/4″  pocket holes in four of the five boards.  I then used wood glue and 1 1/2″ Kreg pocket hole screws to attach the five boards together.  I used my all time favorite stain, Dark Walnut by Minwax, and stained the boards and let them dry.

While the stain was drying,  I went to my computer, opened up Microsoft Word and searched for a font  that I liked.  Once I found one,  I printed out the letters and the heart in the size and font I wanted (each letter and the heart were printed using fairly large font, so I printed one letter per page).

Once the stain was completely dry,  I placed the letters on my board in the locations I wanted them and traced over each of the letters with a pen, making sure to press hard enough to leave indentations in the wood.  Here you can see the outline of the heart traced onto the wood:

Once I had the word traced onto the wood,  I took a small art paintbrush and filled in the traced areas of the L, V, and E with white paint.

Next I gathered a lot of small wall nails and a hammer and began evenly placing nails on the lines where the heart shape had been traced into the wood.  I made sure each nail was hammered in an equal distance so the nail design on the board was uniform:

Since my new duvet cover had  dark blue, light blue, and white colors on it,  I decided to make the colors of the string for the heart match the duvet cover colors in an ombre pattern. I found three spools of embroidery thread at Walmart that closely matched the colors on my duvet cover.  I first started with the dark blue and I wrapped the string around the nails at the top 1/3 of the heart.  Once I had enough dark blue string wrapped around the top nails, I started adding the light blue string towards the bottom of the dark blue string, making sure there was some overlap of the two colors.  I filled in the middle section of the heart with the light blue string, and then towards the bottom of the light blue string, I began adding white string to fill in the bottom 1/3 of the heart.  Here is how the sting art heart turned out:

Here is the completed string art sign prior to hanging it up:

And, here it is after I hung it on the wall above my bed:

 

Once I hung the string art sign up,  I felt like something was missing, so I decided to make some matching candle holders to hang next to the string art sign.  Here’s a sneak peek of those (I’ll post details of that project soon! 😉 ):