Broke, but feeling crafty!

Hello everyone, hope this blog finds you doing well.

Everyone has that time of the month, no, not that time of the month, I mean the time where our wallets are more on the empty-ish side.  Sometimes we are so broke, even spending five dollars on a gift seems expensive!  Unfortunately, your friends will continue to have birthdays (dammit).  This is when the optimistic and creative side of me comes into play.

I LOVE MAKING CUTE CRAP!  There, I said it.  I love being able to put together something so neat from things that I already have around my house.  I was in one of those, "I'm so poor, I can't even afford Ramen" points of my life, but my really good friend was about to turn 23.  I just didn't want to let her birthday pass by without her receiving something special on my behalf. So, I did what many of us would do, I resorted to my handy-dandy, creative bible, PINTEREST!

I stumbled upon this post:

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/431782682995205975/

I thought, "Ok, ok, I can definitely do this."  Wood, string, nails, all crap either my mom or dad have in the garage. PERFECT! Sure enough, I found a piece of wood that wasn't too thin, but thick enough to use.  I asked my dad to cut it to a certain length (I showed him with my hands, didn't actually give him measurements) and decided to get started.  I decided to make some changes as to what the final product would look like, to better suit my friend, but I definitely got inspired from that particular pin on Pinterest. 

For this project you will need:

• A piece of wood,  just thick enough for nails to stay stuck in it.
• String (color of your choice)
• Nails 
• Wrapping paper or paint (I chose wrapping paper)
• A hammer
• Template of a shape or design you want to follow

I don't have a picture of my original piece of wood, but really, that doesn't matter.  The point is that it is thick enough for the nails to go through it. The piece of wood I found was laying around my garage, it even had a shoe print on it.  I didn't care about that since I wiped it down and decided that I was either going to wrap or paint the piece of wood. 

Here are a couple of pictures of some of the materials I used:

Ok, so let's get started on how I got to making this gift!

After I begged my dad to cut the piece of wood that I wanted, I wiped it down with a damp wash cloth and decided that I wanted to wrap the board with some cute wrapping paper that I had previously purchased from Target. You can paint the board if you choose, but if you have some cute wrapping paper laying around, it's a lot faster, cheaper, and easier. 

This is what this step looked like:

After that, I decided to make a paper template of what I needed my design to look like.  That way I wouldn't get confused as to where I was going to put the nails.  I traced the board on some white paper.  I also traced a heart that I wanted to place on the board. 

My template looked like this:

Next, I placed my template on top of my board and started putting in nails right around the heart shape I had chosen. I also decided to put nails in a rectangular shape surrounding the heart. You can choose whatever shape you'd like, I just wanted to do a heart. 

This step looked like this:

As you can see, I ACTUALLY nailed my paper template onto my actual board. I did this on purpose so I wouldn't mess up.  Once you have put in all your nails, you can easily rip the paper template from you board.  If your nails are in deep enough, you don't have anything to worry about. With that said, use those muscles and really let out your frustrations with that hammer. Those nails need to be in deep, have NO MERCY!

Here is a side view of my nail job:

Excuse the bed sheets, I have no idea why the hell I took a picture of this step on my bed.  Anyway, the nails stayed put for the most part, I only had one or two fall out when I tore the paper template out.  NO BIG DEAL, I just put those babies right back in. 

After that I grabbed the pink string I showed you in the beginning and tied a small knot to the first nail I wanted to start my weaving with. I started weaving through all the nails, in no particular pattern or order, I just let my creative juices take control. 

This step looked like this when I first started weaving:

You can choose how much to weave or in which direction you want to weave.  I liked the messy look, I also wanted the pink string to show through the dark pattern from the wrapping paper.  I stopped when it looked like this:

Once I was happy with how my string looked, I tied a small knot over the last nail I weaved around and cut the remaining string. 

Like I mentioned in the beginning, I traced a heart shape for my paper template. I wanted to make this gift a little bit more personalized so I searched for a quote that reminded me of my friend.  Once I found the perfect quote, I printed it out on thick paper and traced around it, again, using the same heart shape from before.  Once it was all cut, I placed it right in the empty heart shape on my board and it fit perfectly!

My final product looked like this:

Here is a closer look at what the quote says:

When I gave this to my friend, she absolutely loved it.  She actually cried.  GO ME! I loved the way it looked at the end and even though it took a good 2-3 hours to get done, it was so worth it.  I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post.  I had a lot of fun making this gift. 

Cheers to being broke and creative!

- Gabby