I am always looking for things to hang on the walls but sometimes a room already has too many frames or mirrors. The spot I was looking for needed something more organic with texture. When I saw the DIY Yarn Wall Art by Harlow & Thistle, I knew I had to give it a try. You can find the full tutorial here.
You will need:
- Metal hoops
- Yarn (in coordinating colors and textures)
- Butcher’s twine
- A good pair of fabric scissors to trim the bottoms
- THAT’S IT!
I actually found these gold hoops from the craft store first, but picking out yarn textures and colors took me forever! There are so many shades of grey, khaki and white, finding the three that go together was challenging. The khaki and cream are pretty standard but I love love love the silvery grey bulky yarn I found. I love the texture and that it has a slight sheen to it.
Cut the pieces of yarn in 4 foot strips, and two at a time, looped them over the ring with the knot portion facing forward.
After deciding how far you want to go along the bottom of the ring, start on the second loop with the next color. I did the same with the khaki: 4 foot strips, bunched in twos and then looped over the ring, knot facing forward.
For the smallest ring, I wanted to try macrame. I used a tutorial by Parlor. Her illustrations made the process way easier than I expected. Next time, I would like to try it with string meant for macrame as the yarn was quite stretchy and the fibers did not give the knots the definition it needed.
I used cotton butcher’s twine to wrap all of the rings together and create a hanging loop as the yarn would not hold up all of that weight. To finish, trim the ends into whatever shape you choose! I also knotted the bottoms of the grey yarn as they were starting to unravel.
I love this because it was really easy and something different to add to your wall space! Every part can be customized to fit the look and feel of your home.
Gail is a native of Florida, but has now adopted California as her own, thanks to her love of avocados and mountains (one of which Florida is lacking). She has been working as an in-house book designer for over 8 years and works on freelance illustration projects in her spare time. She has illustrated one educational digital picture book and hopes to publish one of her author/illustrated stories one day as a classic picture book. For her, picture books bring together her love of illustration, typography, and printing–and she will yammer on about them for hours if you let her.
I decided to make use of what I had lying around: scrap watercolor paper (Arches, 140 lb), remnants from larger sheets that I cut down to sizes needed for various finished projects. I cut the remnants into 5×7 sizes, with any smaller pieces heading straight to the scrap bin, to be used later to test watercolor mixes before I apply them to finished pieces. Each large sheet of watercolor paper is too expensive to let anything go to waste.
Drawings were done in pen-and-ink, sometimes being sketched out first in pencil, sometimes drawn freeform and impulsively. That is particularly true with some of my favorite animals: foxes, elephants, giraffes. They are fun to draw and I’ve probably drawn them a few too many times.
