Erin Mary: String Heart

My last post was about a few Pinterest mishaps that have come my way, but not all of my Pinterest ventures have gone awry. Recently, I spotted a DIY String heart that caught my eye and made its way into the "I-need-to-make-this-or-it-is-going-to-haunt-me-night-and-day" category.

And so it was, and here it is:

Here was the process:

I bought a piece of plywood from Lowes; I really wanted a piece of barn wood for this project, and I even scoured dumpsters and fields as I was driving around, but couldn't come up with any. I guess I could have visited a barn? So, I used this faux barn wood painting tutorial on The House of Smiths. Plywood wasn't the best platform to work with here, but it did the trick. (The House of Smiths is a really fabulous home decorating blog, by the way.)

Next, I folded a piece of wrapping paper in half, drew a heart of desired size, cut it out, and taped it to the "barn wood". With a sharpie, I made a mark about every 1/4 inch or so.

I bought small black nails (they were actually labeled as "tacks") and hammered them in on the specified spots.

Next, I ripped the wrapping paper off (felt like a kid at Christmas, I did).

Then it got really fun. So much so, that I don't have any pics to document this step. I started winding yarn around this way, and that way, and didn't stop until I darn well wanted to. The only glitch at this part, was that some of the tacks were not nailed in quite far enough. They would start to loosen and sometimes came out altogether, so I had to use brute force and make sure they were nailed in far enough (but not too far as to peirce through the wood). Once I was content with the yarn pattern (I redid the whole thing twice because it wasn't just so), I wrapped the yarn around the outside of the heart to define it, and then I hung that thing.

This was meant to play a Valentines inspired role in our decor, but the more it sits above our mantle, the more I fall in love.