Panel "Cancer of threads and nails"

My girlfriend has a birthday on July 11, it turns out according to the horoscope she is cancer. So I decided to give her a symbolic gift made by myself. I wanted to make an original panel of threads and carnations with the image of an arthropod. This hand-made technique is called string art. Very exciting and unusual in performance.
For work, I prepared the following components:
- a wooden board;
- hammer;
- decorative carnations;
- awl;
- a simple pencil;
- a ruler;
- scissors;
- image of cancer;
- threads of black and gray.
First you need to prepare an image of cancer. Since I am not very talented in drawing, I found the drawing on the Internet, where coloring books for children are stored. It remains only to cut it.
With a simple pencil I drew the same cancer on a wooden board. To do this, I circled the image along the contour, and then traced the details. You also need to identify the frame of the picture. I just stepped back from the edge of 0.5 cm and drew straight lines using a ruler.
That’s such a nice cancer.
It is necessary to outline the places where decorative carnations will be driven. To do this, you can put points in the figure, an interval of 5 mm.
The more there are such points, the denser the cloves will be arranged and the pattern will become more noticeable.
To make it easier to drive in nails, it is better to make shallow holes with the help of an awl.
I also used pliers. They held a carnation and drove to the desired height. This will make it possible to determine the same driving height of all cloves.
Now the threads are included in the work. You can take any: from sewing threads to knitting yarn. I used the "iris" series in my work. I tied a gray thread to the last lower clove and began to weave between the hats.
First, you can lead the thread in one direction, then in the opposite direction, after - through one hat. But chaotic weaves also look good. This is what the gray background looks like. I filled them with the space between the cancer and the edge of the work.
And with black thread I laid out the drawing of the symbol itself. Moved in different directions, trying not to leave empty spaces.
I also made a symbolic frame. I just took the black thread and twisted it between the carnations of the extreme row in the form of a figure eight.
This is how the completed work looks.
On my girlfriend’s birthday, my gift simply caused a lot of surprise and admiration. This work immediately found its place on the kitchen wall. They also took promises from me that the same panels would soon appear in the apartments of two other friends.