Last year, I started making a vintage String Art schooner from a kit a friend gave me after his wife died. I knew I wasn’t going to use the white thread for the sails, and I thought it would be interesting to use colored thread. I started stringing sails with two colors of thread that were both at hand and matched our decor. Once you start stringing, you pretty much have to finish the entire sail; it’s probable that stopping halfway through will leave a difference in tension.
Having done this much work, I can see that the non-alignment of tiny nails makes a small difference.
I reached a stopping point along the way and collected more thread to use for the remaining sails. I was planning to put the darker colors in the background and use the lighter colors up front.
However, when rummaging around in my thread basket, I found some metallic thread bought at The Scrap Exchange in Durham. The thread art I had seen at an upscale resale store was done in metallic thread, and bronze works in our home, and it was simply too tempting not to try.
I cut the first sails off the ship and went to work.
There’s more stretch in the metallic yarn, so I had to be more careful about stringing with an even tension. However, it worked.
Here’s the ship with the sails finished. I still have to add covers to the nails and trim the loose ends of thread.
We hung the ship in the newly-painted breakfast room, where it is protected from direct sunlight and gleams in a corner with low light. The picture was barely on the wall before I found another string art ship at the Goldsboro Habitat Restore, and that’s a story for another post. eBay has listings for the schooner’s companion ship, a clipper ship. It also has three masts but is laid out horizontally on the board. Not all listings identify the ships correctly.
