Panel "Cancer made of threads and nails"

My girlfriend's birthday is July 11, and according to her horoscope, she is a Cancer. So I decided to give her a symbolic present, made with your own hands. I wanted to make an original panel from threads and nails with the image of an arthropod. This hand-made technique is called string art. Very exciting and unusual in execution.

For work, I prepared the following components:
- wooden board;
- hammer;
- decorative carnations;
- awl;
- a simple pencil;
- ruler;
- scissors;
- image of cancer;
- black and gray threads.



First you need to prepare an image of the cancer. Since I’m not very talented at drawing, I found the drawing on the Internet, where coloring books for children are stored. All that's left is to cut it out.



Using a simple pencil, I drew the same crayfish on a wooden board. To do this, I outlined the image and then drew the details. You also need to designate the frame of the picture. I simply stepped back 0.5 cm from the edge and drew straight lines using a ruler.



This is such a cute cancer.



It is necessary to mark the places where decorative carnations will be driven in. To do this, you can put dots in the figure, with an interval of 5 mm.



The more such dots there are, the denser the carnations will be and the pattern will become more noticeable.
To make it easier to drive nails, it is better to use an awl to make shallow holes.
I also used pliers. They held the nail and drove it to the desired height. This will allow you to determine the same height for driving in all the nails.



Now the threads come into play. You can take anything from sewing threads to knitting yarn. I used the “iris” series in my work. I tied a gray thread to the bottommost nail and began to weave between the caps.




First, you can lead the thread in one direction, then in the opposite direction, then through one cap. But chaotic weaves also look good. This is what the gray background looks like. I used it to fill the space between the cancer and the edge of the work.



And with black thread I laid out the drawing of the symbol itself. She moved in different directions, trying not to leave empty spaces.



I also made a symbolic frame. I just took a black thread and wove it between the studs of the outermost row in the shape of a figure eight.



This is what the completed work looks like.



On my friend’s birthday, my gift simply caused a lot of surprise and admiration. This work immediately found its place on the kitchen wall. They also made me promises that the same panels should soon appear in the apartments of two other friends.