Pinterest State Outline Project

Holy crap, I'm blogging! And the project I completed this morning was inspired by this pin:

I wanted to do a little bit of a different take on this, and when I saw this square board at Goodwill yesterday for just $2, I knew it was perfect for what I had in mind:

It is no secret that I fiercely love love love my home state of Missouri, and my hometown (and current place of residence) of St. Louis. Oh my gosh do I fiercely love the STL. I wanted to make a MO state outline with a very obvious heart where St. Louis goes on the map. Since Missouri fits nicely into a square, I knew a square board was needed.

So I took off the price sticker from the board and spray-painted it teal.

The other materials I needed were cheap-o nails (the ones I got were 3/4" long, and be sure they have the head so the string has something to grab on to) and cheap off-brand embroidery floss in white:

Okay, so here's the process of how I started:

I will say, since St. Louis is on the border of MO and IL, I messed up some of the nails, so the heart outline is goofy. It was difficult to hammer the nails so close together like this. So to help disguise my shitty nails here, I used simple acrylic red paint I had laying around and painted in the heart over St. Louis:

Then it was time to start threading. To begin, I dabbed one nail with fabri-tac glue and wrapped the beginning of the floss around until its frayed end was stuck to the nail, leaving no excess thread. Does that make sense?

I wrapped the loop of floss around my left wrist, and used my right hand to go across the state and catch on nails randomly:

Here's a progress shot. Unlike my pinterest inspiration, I didn't want my thread to be heading all in the same direction of the heart since it's not in the middle of the state. So, random thread going everywhere:

And when I got to the end of a spool of floss, I used my same trick of dabbing some glue around the nail, and wrapped the excess thread around and snipped off any frayed floss when the glue dried. I used three little spools of thread. 

And ta-da!

 For now, it's sitting in my bedroom. Aside from the problem of nailing the heart right next to the outline, this was a really really easy project. And in all, it prob cost about $5 ($2 for the thrifted square picture board thing, $1.90 for nails, $.75 for embroidery floss.) and took about 2 hours in total? Maybe a little less than that.

I like how the white pops against the teal background, and I especially love how the heart jumps out the most. 

Done any good pinterest-inspired DIY projects lately??