Hammering away at things.... literally

I am the middle child in a family with three girls. So I had the joy (and occasional misery) of growing up with two sisters. My mom used to say I was the icing in the middle of the Oreo cookie - but I think she just said this as a way to combat my Middle Child Syndrome - all you middle kids out there totally know what I am talking about.

My older sister lives in Toronto, but my little sister lives near me. She is a peach and a total looker.

Photo: Laura Kelly Photography

Told you so.

Anyways, she is moving to a new apartment at the end of the month and I wanted to make her something for her new place. I had done some nail & yarn art on the seating chart for our wedding and I was looking for a chance to try some more.

 

Photo: Laura Kelly Photography

The seating chart was not small (it was 4 feet x 2 feet - and I almost dropped it on my foot twice). She wanted something to hang over her bed, so used the same building design and shrunk it down a little bit.

Instead of using a wood-colour stain like I did on the seating chart I decided instead to try out a new grey stain I found. Once it was built I took it to the garage and gave it one coat of the Winwax stain in Classic Grey.

I wasn't sure how the stain would absorb, so I only left it on for about 8 minutes. When I wiped it off it was not dark enough (and some of the boards had a red hue to them).

We did a second coat of the stain and then started on the nail design.

For the design I originally wanted to do the letters LOVE, but as I was making my stencil I thought that was a little too boring. So I decided to put the word LOVE inside a heart (not exactly a wild choice... but a little less boring I think). The plan was the wrap the yarn between the heart and the letters and leave the inside of the letters just the wood. I'm not sure if that explanation makes any sense.... when I tried to explain it the Mr he looked at me like I had just eaten a container of play-doh. Luckily for me, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I printed off the word love in the font and size that I wanted. I didn't want it centred in the heart, so it is off a bit to the right side of the board. Finding the right spacing for the nails was hard and because the letters were not huge and there were some places where I had to space them a little differently. I really do love symmetry... but sometimes you just have to go with what works.



Side Note: this may not have been a good project to work on with a glass of wine. No one was injured, but wine was spilt... and that may actually have be worse.

I had to change the shape of the letters a little as I went along. I used smaller nails on the seating chart, so I had to adjust my spacing to make room for the large nail heads.

Once I finished the letters I pulled off the paper stencil and laid out my heart stencil. I had the cut out the middle of the heart so that I could lay it over the LOVE nails.

Side note: I realize it looks like I drew the heart stencil drunk, but I promise it really was symmetrical - it was just the inside part that I cut sloppy. Notice that I am not saying I wasn't drunk... rather that it was symmetrical and my sobriety wouldn't have made a difference. *wink

I nailed around the outside of the heart stencil and then once i gained feeling back in my arm I took off the paper. Now it is ready for the yarn.

I must admit when I did the yarn part of the seating chart there was a lot of swearing. My little sister was actually at my house when I was working on it and witnessed a lot of profanity... she thought it was hilarious and I could hear her laughing upstairs while I hollered the F* word in the basement.

Luckily this time around went much smoother. As smooth as wrapping yarn around a billion nails could go I guess.

Side note: I took the above and below pics in different rooms and with different camera setting... hence the wood looks really different. In real life it is actually the grey colour below. I just didn't want you to think that this project is some kind of a photoshop scam... although that would be pretty impressive.

xo B