String Art Craft for Kids

Since leaving that hourly craft job back in 2012, one of the things I have been doing has been devoting my free time to our church congregation. For the longest time that was just me helping with our Events Ministry. At the start of the year, I was promoted to the Chairperson. As a result, the last few months have been dedicated to coming up with some events for various age groups.

In November, I briefly mentioned a craft day for kids I had hosted with one kid and a paper craft. Well that idea has become a more regular event for 2015. My goal is to be cost effective and fun for kids ranging from 3 to 5th grade. This past Saturday, we had 10 kids and we did string art for less than $2 per participant!

The secret here was using fence pickets from Home Depot. We got two pickets that were 5.5" by 6ft for $2.30 per piece. We don't have a table saw or anything like that for clean saw cuts at home so we had the guys at Home Depot cut the wood into 12" lengths. As a side note, they will do two cuts for free and it is 50 cents per cut after that. That added to our overall cost but we still left Home Depot spending just a touch over $10 with the additional cuts and a box of 1in panel board nails. Last on my list of supplies was the string. For us, it was a mix of yarn I had at home and an assortment of craft string I got with a 50% coupon at JoAnn's.

As for the directions here, they are pretty straight forward. I traced heart and cross shapes on the boards with pencil. Then I hammered the nails in so that they were securely in the wood. From there just wrap the string around each nail in whichever design you'd like starting with the end knotted around one nail. Since this was a church event, we finished each piece with a saying from our lesson's scripture with paint pen. And that's it. Super easy and super fun!