Yarn Art

I've been seeing a lot of this online lately...

So cute. (By the way, this image came from this tutorial). The other day, I decided to make my own and learned a few things in the process. I started out with a piece of wood that has been sitting in our carport FOREVER.

It's part of a desk we dismantled and has been collecting cobwebs and all kinds of nasty. I gave it a quick clean with a paper towel and some cleaning product and spray painted it with a can of blue paint I already had on hand. I freehanded a heart on it with a pencil and it was super lopsided, so I put several pieces of paper on the board, taped them together so it was the same size as the board, folded it in half and cut the heart out. After taping the heart down, I grabbed a box of nails and started hammering away. Next, of course comes the yarn. The finished product looks like this:

To be honest, I am not super stoked with how it turned out. Because I only used supplies I had on hand, it was free. However, next time I attempt something like this, I will do the following things differently...

1. USE MORE NAILS! A free project has some drawbacks. When it came to nails, I had a limited number so when I used them all, that was it.
2. Use shorter nails. I had to be careful not to hammer through the wood since my nails were pretty long.
3.  Use more yarn. Yarn I have in abundance but once the nails were out of room for twisting, I had to cut the yarn short and call it good.
4. Keep tweaking my template until I LOVE it. My heart looks wonky instead of the cute one I had envisioned.

Over all, I want to try this project again. I don't know that I'll take this one apart when I have more wood and I want to use different nails and a different template anyway. This is one that will have to wait for one of my stretches of solitude. Hammer + nails usually doesn't = toddler friendly. Especially when you have a toddler that loves tools AND helping.