 It's Megan Viscio here again with the Forestville Public Library and in my class today I'm going to teach you how to make a fall inspired nail and string piece of art. So I hope you had a chance to pick up your supplies at the library and let's begin. So now you're ready to begin and you'll just need to gather your supplies. You'll need a few things from home. You need a piece of scrap paper, a pair of scissors, a pencil, any kind of tape, and then just a some sort of fabric or old towel that you can work on. It's just going to take up some of that noise when you're hammering on the wood to keep under your piece. So this is grippy. It doesn't have to be any old towel, shirt, whatever you can find. Oh and most importantly you'll need your hammer. Hopefully you have one at home. If not maybe a family member or a neighbor has one you can borrow. I purchased this at Harbor Freight for my classes. It's about three bucks so that's a pretty good deal if you are interested in buying them. And then you have your supplies that you got from the library. You have just quite an array of different type fall colors of yarn and thread, a small bag of wire nails, and most importantly your piece of wood. And this is locally sawn cutoffs of hemlock, sawn by my father-in-law, and right up the hill. Okay so the first thing you want to do is look at your piece of wood. You're going to decide what side you want to work on. Look at both sides, whatever you like better. I like this one so I'm going to work on this side and you're going to decide what you want to put on. Now these pieces are all different shapes and sizes. You might get a long skinny one or a square. There's some bigger ones in there, some smaller ones in there. So look at your piece of wood and think about what you want to put on it. Maybe a pumpkin or a tree or a sunflower. Maybe some leaves. Maybe you just want to do a simple heart and fill it in with all these colors to make it kind of feel more fallish. So after you've decided, I want you to keep your design as simple as possible. And when I say simple, I mean really simple. Think basic shapes. Here's just some basic drawings I did like an apple. See it's just very basic. There's no small spaces. There's no details. Pumpkin, a really simple tree or maybe two leaves that look really bananas. So once you've thought of it, I'm going to look at my wood and I want to make a tree from this. So I'm just going to take my, I'm going to make a tree on there. So I'm just going to take my scrap paper, line up the corners and press all the way around. Put that shape out on the line that you folded. Got your paper or we're going to draw our design. Again, keeping simple. Think of a border on this piece of paper about a quarter of an inch to almost half inch. Don't put any nails in here, okay? So keep your drawing kind of right in the middle. When you try to nail around the outside, a lot of times the nail just wants to fall right out of the wood. So I'm just kind of keeping that in mind and I'm going to draw my very simple, just kind of whimsical shape tree. So I've got my design and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw my nails where my nail spots where my nails are going to go. This is just going to be our pattern. What you want to remember is that a nail has to go on every point, okay? So one here, one there. A nail has to go there, okay? Because our strings are going to go around it. A nail here, nail there. If you had something a triangle shape, there'd have to be a nail on every point, okay? And then you fill in the rest. But every point has to have a nail, okay? Then you want to just go in and fill all the dots and I'm just going to think spacing-wise. We don't want to crowd it too much because we're not going to be able to get our string through there and it's just going to hurt our fingers. I think about a pinky, a pinky length, a pinky width, sorry, okay? So you can use your pinky, you can use a ruler, just go all the way around. Okay, so now that you've got it all done, you are ready to start putting in your nails. I like to secure my paper to my wood with just a couple pieces of tape just on the top and bottom. Let's practice, okay? Practice what it feels like hammering these kind of nails into this type of wood. It's a very soft wood so your nails will go in pretty easy. What I like to do is hold my nail between my two fingers and give it a couple taps just to set the nail. And then I give it another tap. You want to put your nail about halfway into that wood, okay? If you start hammering and your nails are going to go sideways, which might happen, okay? You can just give it a tap. Sometimes that opens up a hole in the wood, but just just give it a gentle tap. And when your nails are standing up straight, you know you can move to the front, okay? And then you'll just have to pull these nails out with either a pair of pliers or the back of your hammer. Okay, so now I've done my practice. I'm ready to go on my tree. Just going to start anywhere. Like I said, hold the nail a couple taps. You can hold it the whole time. You're just careful with your fingers. That's why I like these little hammers. They're just they're not too heavy so it doesn't hurt your fingers. And I'll come back when it's all done and I'll show you what our next step is. Okay, so I went around and put all my nails in. And this is a different tree, but I just used it for filming purposes. Same idea. So you just want to go kind of put your piece on the side, check that all your nails look pretty straight, look nice and pushed in so they don't pop out when we're stringing. And then once you're at this point, if you've kept your design pretty simple, you can just tear this paper off. And now it's time to add some color, do some dot to dot with our thread and our yarn. One thing I want to teach you is about layering. So I'm going to do a brown trunk and maybe a mix of green and red up in the tree. It's going to be kind of a tree churning red. What I want to think about is the brown I want to kind of stay in the back and I want the tree, the red part to come forward. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my brown on first. I'm going to take my brown and keeping it on this cardboard spool because that's going to help it to keep from knotting up. I'm just going to start at one corner and tie my thread on one nail, one, two, three, three knots, okay? Very important that you leave this little tail here. See there's this tail because we're going to come back and use that. Okay so I've got three knots, I've got a tail. What I'm going to start doing is just going around my nails. So while I'm doing this, I need to remember to keep tension. I am always pulling on this thread. If I am doing it loose like this, it's all going to come off, okay? So it's very important you have to keep that thread really tight, okay? So here I am just going around filling in my trunk. Every once in a while it helps if you have a nail and I'm just going to loop around it twice, okay? That's going to help that if you suddenly let go of this, it's not all going to unravel. I'm just going to try to find different ways of getting filling in those spaces. Maybe I want to go do a crisscross pattern. This finger is just kind of helping to push down this hand. It's just kind of helping to push down that thread. Maybe I want to do a little crisscrossing. It's kind of cool. Crisscross back up. It gives a neat texture and you can always push down with your finger. Push that thread down because you're going to run out of room. If you have a lot of yarn there, you're going to run out of room. When I'm happy with my filling, what I like to do is I like to outline my shape, okay? So outlining, it's just going down and back up. Loop around a nail and come back up. This is tricky. You have to really... I mean there's no science to it. It just makes your shape pop. See how I'm giving that outline? It makes that shape pop a little bit more. Here you have some in-dense. Again, don't forget to, every once in a while, loop around the nail. That kind of puts a breaks out and holds it. I'm just going to outline over here. If I have extra thread and you want to go ahead and fill this all up and make it really dense with color, do it. When you are done with that color, we need to now tie this off. So what I'm going to do is I say I'm up here. I'm going to make my way back down to this nail where we started, okay? Making my way back down. When I get to that nail, I want to loop it like two times, okay? Or three times. That's going to hold it. So when you let go, it's not going to come all unraveling and you're going to cut your thread. I'm not going to because I want to reuse this string. You're going to cut your thread and using that tail that you started with, you're going to do three knots again. Nice and tight. Not too tight where you're going to break your yarn. It does break. If it does break midway through, you have to maybe tie it off and start over. Okay? Three knots. Now you can cut that. You can cut your two threads and then I usually just take my pencil, something not too sharp and poke it in there. See how tight that is? It's really tight. It's not going to pop off my nails. That's how you want it. That's by just keeping that tension and it's going to be something that you have to practice. This is a complicated project. This isn't the easiest one, but I know you can do it. I've done this with second graders and they thought they started out thinking, how am I going to ever do this? But you know what? They kept on trying and they got it. And the thing is if you start winding and you're going around and then it just pops off, that's okay. Take it all off and start over. With this kind of thing, it's kind of cool. You can practice and practice and practice and it's not permanent until you tie that knot at the end. Okay, so with this tree and like I said, I'm going to go in with green first and then highlight with red. Again, just going to show you three knots here. Any nail is fine. It doesn't have to be. It can be anywhere. Any nail is fine. Remember, leave that tail. Okay, and then just kind of go around. Kind of like a design. Keeping that tension. This hand over here can just help push stuff down. I just want a little bit of green. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to loop around that last nail. Remember, we got a loop. See, it's easy. It goes quick. When it escapes you, it goes quick. Make sure you can always push down that thread if it's kind of in your way because we're going to put another layer on this. So I'm going to go make my way back down to that first one we started on. Then I'm going to loop it around three times, pulling nice tension. Cut it and just quickly tie that knot before it can get away from you. Now I'm going to go in with some red to make it look like this tree is turning color. Nice and tight. Leaving that tail and now I'm just going to go in and highlight that this tree is kind of changing color. Now I don't want to outline this one because it's a tree. So I want the edges to be kind of more organic. Kind of need something more down here. Remember, I was talking about layering, so I'm going to go over that brown so it looks like my leaves are in front of my trunk, which is usually how you see a tree. The trunk is set behind. Get to that top nail where we started. I'm going to turn it around, keeping that tension and cut. I don't know if I looped around but I'll do it again, loop around that last nail and keeping tension, tie your three. Then you can go ahead and tuck those tails in or leave them out. Maybe that's part of your piece. There we go. There's my tree. I'm happy with it and I think it really looks great. So just a couple other techniques. If you want to do just an outline, so maybe like I did this leaf one. Okay, see I just did an outline. This is a little more advanced because it has some stuff going on inside but that's just an outline. I'll just show you how to do that really quick. So again, you're just going to tie your string on at one nail and you're going to go around the outside. You're going to go past one, back one. So you're just kind of past a nail and back track. Always keeping that tension past a nail, back track. This is just a way of outlining. Just a word to the wise. When you're doing your project, you're going to get going and get really good at doing your yarn and there might be a facing inward point. Once you get going, sometimes you're just moving so fast that you forget what you're doing and you might just cross right over without thinking that inner corner. Okay, then you totally, you know, you don't have your heart shape anymore. So I'm just reminding you to make sure that you do not go through that space but that you go around it. Okay, just that's a way you can outline something. You might want to fill this in with like, maybe you want to fill it with an orange and then outline with red. Okay, now you know how to do that. And then again, you just come down here and you're all done. Loop around that nail a couple times, tie it off, trim and then you can tuck those in. You can also glue them so you don't see but that's how you do an outline. So just one other thing. If you want to make your piece something that can hang on the wall, you'll just have to buy one of these little hangers that you can get at really any hardware store. You'll have to nail that on the back. Just make sure you have some sort of protection underneath so that your nails don't scratch the table that you're working on. If you have some extra yarn after you've made your piece, I thought some neat ideas that you could use the extra. Maybe you have a stick in your backyard or you found a cool stick at the beach. You can do some yarn wrapping around your stick or I really love rock so I wrap some extra yarn around a rock. Just another idea, use up the extra string that you have. Thanks again for coming to my class and I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you have a great time making some art. Thanks, bye!