State String Art Love - Virginchusetts

You might be a bit confused by the latter half of that title, but let me explain it. My Big Guy has been putting his witty 10-year-old prowess to work with puns and other wordy jokes, and when I completed this project (the first time) he dubbed it Virginchusetts. So it's now stuck.

So if you've followed Sew Half Crazy on Instagram or Facebook, then you know for the last 3 weeks or so we've been diligently working in our basement. Super Bowl is Sunday. We're hosting. We've got a bit more to get done. Eek! I digress.

So when we got the built-in done there was lots of space to decorate, not to mention in the rest of the basement as well.

You see, the basement has always been sort of our forgotten area. Its been a mashup of stuff that just didn't work anywhere else, but we didn't want to get rid of it. I'm glad that now our basement has a direction, at least decor wise. It's a mashup of us. Things the hubs like, things I like, things that the kids make us keep.

Hubs is from Massachusetts. He loves his Sox, and Pats, and beeh. I'm Virginia through and through. I love Charlottesville, UVa (wahoowa!), and pretty, shiny things.  We've managed to be married for 13 years, and that number will only grow and grow, so it was time that our basement reflected the mashup of us.

When we finished the built-in, I knew just what I wanted to go up in the top right center shelf.

String Art.

I've seen it. I've admired it. Didn't have a good enough reason to put all of that into fruition. Until now.

I did a couple of Pinterest and Google searches, and its really straight forward. Nails, wood, string, and patience. Well 3 out of 4 isn't bad.

I started off this project by doing a google search for free state photoshop shapes. There are a lot of them.

Then I opened a new document to the size that my piece of scrap oak was. Disclaimer - I finished my oak with just a couple of coats of matte polyurethane. My oak was about 12" x 16".

I sized Virginia first, because it's bigger than Mass, then I played with the size of Massachusetts until I liked the ratio. We're not going for accuracy here.

Oh I did overlay the general area of Massachusetts where my hubs grew up over the general area of where I grew up and we now live. It worked out nicely that way.

No, I didn't grow up in Charlottesville, but I've got family in the area and a lot of my best memories are from that area.

I added a heart and then stroked the image with a widely spaced brush to create the dots around the 3 shapes.

After printing the two pages out, and taping them together, I taped the whole thing to my oak board and  began the laborious task of nailing in a whole lot of copper flashing nails. Some people use brass coated linoleum nails, others just use brads. I like copper, so I went with copper flashing nails.

You will want to use pliers to hold those nails in. I found that they not only saved my fingers, but they were also helpful in maintaining a uniform height when banging in all the nails.

Once all the nailing was done, then came the fun part of stringing it. I decided to go crazy and not have any rhyme or reason to my stringing. I simply tied one end of the string underneath the nail head and went to town.

So then I started on Massachusetts, and then I took the silver off and restrung it with a darker gunmetal color.

I love how this turned out.

I can't wait to show off the rest of the built-in and how we styled it! I guess I need to go nab some new pictures of it!

Thanks for visiting!