Home is Where the Heart is

Update: I just linked this project up to "Tute"-inTueday over on Oops I Craft My Pants! Stop over there and have a looksie at all of Ericka's awesomeness as well as the other projects that get linked up today!

Once again I have been inspired by Pinterest. Having been enamoured by images like this

and this

I knew that I wanted a little something on my walls to remind me of my roots. I decided to go ahead and go for the more complex version (string art!) as I wanted to try something new and I remembered a cross project I did in bible school ages ago that still hangs at my parents house and that additional memory prompted this project.
So I got started:

1) I purchased a wooden plaque from Michaels and some white acrylic paint and put just one quick coat on as it covered pretty nicely. I also wanted to have the brush marks in the paint so I made sure to paint in just a left to right motion.

2) Vince so kindly printed out an image of the Great State of Iowa for me weeks ago, I simply taped it down to the painted plaque and started putting in my nails (from a frame hanging kit at Dollar Tree, 109 nails for $1 baby!) I tried to equally space them about a half inch apart from one another but this was by no means precise.

3) Close up of the nails. I didn't follow the border exactly except the wonderful straight lines on the northern and southern borders of the state. East and west were wiggly and curvy and I just did the best that I could to make it still look like Iowa.

4) I also added a little "heart" shape near where Oskaloosa is on the map. Again, not precise. Eyeballing at best. I then started stringing my yarn back and forth between the heart nails and the border nails. I tried to keep things as even as possible but really I just randomly covered the space.

5) Close to finished, I still filled in a lot of the little gaps that you see here.

In case you are interested this is the thread that I used :)

Vince made a suggestion of adding some color to the heart to make it stand out more. I thought that was great idea so I just wound some dark red thread around the nails on the heart.

What do you think? Someday when I actually put up my gallery wall this will be one of the pieces on it! And in case you try this out for yourself, try to make sure all of your nails are the same length, this makes it easy when you are hammering your little fingers off trying to get them all the same length once in the plaque.