Flamingo Pink & Aqua

After I finished the last 3 pieces, I managed to get them hung on the wall (!!—they could easily have been sitting on the floor for months…).  Of course, now I want to do 4 more pieces to fill in the area completely—will post in the future when I get around to doing those pieces 🙂

The piece that I made after those was a present for my boyfriend for Valentine’s Day—I felt it was a preventative measure to keep him from taking one of the pieces off of my wall for himself 😉 (he loves the string art).  I had a remaining piece of wood from when I had the large pieces cut and stained/painted it black instead of walnut as it works better with his apartment furnishings.  He has a thing for circles & also a particular orange/blue color combination that I happened to already have in my string collection (he’s a computer graphics guy…I don’t know if that actually explains both of those points, but whatever).  This was actually the hardest piece I’ve made, mainly because I was making it for someone else—I didn’t take pics during the process as I wasn’t posting about it as I was doing it (would ruin the surprise), but I ended up stringing & re-stringing & nailing & re-nailing a number of times before I was happy with the finished piece.  The other thing that made it difficult was not going off of a set pattern & just kind of making it up as I went along; oh & I ran out of string (DMC perle cotton #5) and had to hunt down more in the exact color, etc., etc.  Anyway, here it is:

The orange circle on the left is made with two overlaid circles—I used the same stringing as on the teardrop, but went all the way around to make a circle.  The technique is essentially the same as the “edging on inside of curve” in this instruction sheet, but my initial tie on point was where their arrow is (at the top of the circle), I went to the right instead of to the left, and I chose a second nail to string to further away from the first to create a smaller hole in the center.  I then went back over it using the same technique, but chose a second nail closer to the first to create a larger hole in the center.

The blue circle on the right is made with many, many overlapping triangles, which gives it both the opening in the center & the look of edging.  Basically you make an initial triangle & then shift over one & make another & continue until the whole thing is done—this can be done with squares or any other n-sided shape you want.

After I finished that piece, I decided to make a piece inside of an embroidery hoop (I saw one on Pinterest & decided it would be fun to try) for my embroidery hoop wall.

So I started with an embroidery hoop, a pencil, a ruler & a pair of scissors to make notches for the string in the inner hoop & then I started stringing—I did the same technique as the orange circles in the above piece for the orange in this one, but made the yellow circle using the filled circle left hollow in the instruction sheet.  I used Aleene’s fast drying craft glue at each of the notches after it was strung to keep the string in place & then put the outer hoop on & hung it up.