All you need is cardstock, needle and embroidery thread, tape, paperclips, and a silhouette design to make your own frame-worthy string art.
We will be doing this project in Craft Lab at Dundee Library and the Randall Oaks Library on these dates (be sure to register!):
For ages 11-18.
Saturday, February 6, 3 p.m. (Dundee Library)
Monday, February 15, 3 p.m. (Randall Oaks Library)
Interested in learning how you can make these cool designs? Here are the steps:
1. Find and print a silhouette design. I chose Darth Vader, and this design turned out to be a little more complicated than the squirrel, fox, and Batman logo above. Working around the holes in his mouthpiece and eyes took a lot of time (between 3 and 4 hours). I'd recommend starting with a simple, solid design for your first string art project.
2. Choose your color of cardstock and embroidery thread. I went with red cardstock and black thread.
3. Use paperclips to secure your design to the top of your cardstock.
4. Take your needle and poke holes to outline the entire design, plus any "interior" portions of the design, like eyes, nose, etc.
5. When you have outlined all parts of your design, remove the paperclips and top piece of paper.
6. You can choose how many strands of thread to use. For this project I used two strands. Thread your needle and then tape the thread to the back of your project.
7. Now you can get creative and make whatever patterns you wish for your design.
8. The back of the project should look like a bunch of dashes.
9. I recommend working section by section. Later you can go back and fill in sections as you like.
10. When you finish each strand, tape the end to the back of the cardstock. You may also have to do this if you run into a bad knot situation (you don't see it in this picture, but it happened several times as I worked on this project).
11. Notice how for this design I had to go around certain areas so that Darth Vader's mouthpiece, eyes, and helmet would stand out. This required a lot of patience!
12. Here's the finished project. I might still go back and fill in more string where there are some larger gaps.
