Archives for October 2020

While I was furloughed, I had plenty of time on my hands and multiple projects I wanted to do. At the beginning of quarantine, my husband and I painted our study and there was this big wall that needed something special. It was the first thing you would see when you came into my house and I wanted it to be a stand out piece.

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Pinterest had given me plenty of ideas and I wanted to incorporate the mountains into the piece. Living in South Texas, we are as far from mountains as possible and so they are my favorite landscape.

What you’ll need

• dowel pole 2″ thick
• stain (optional)
• 2 spools of macrame yarn (I purchased this one)
• fabric dye (I bought this and this)
• masking tape
• scissors
• table saw (optional)

Cutting and Staining the Dowel pole

The down pole we bough was 8′ long and the artwork I was planning on making was going to 6′ so I cut the extra 2′ off with the table saw.

If you don’t have a table saw, or don’t want to do any cutting, then you can purchase a dowel pole closer to the length you want. Or you can have the people at Lowes or Home Depot cut it to length for you.

Then I stained the pole with 2 coats of a dark walnut satin stain and sealer.

Tying the Yarn to the Pole

You are going to start with a Lark’s Head Knot

I cut yarn the length of my couch as a measurement to knot to the dowel pole. I wanted the yarn to be 4′ long once knotted, so the cut pieces needed to be about 8′ long.

It took about 2 days to get this done (I took a lot of break and we needed to use the couch for other things).

Mapping out the Mountains

Once the yarn was attached to the pole, I trimmed it so it was relatively even at the bottom.

Then I used masking tape to map out the mountain shapes and levels I wanted on the piece. I wasn’t completely sure this was going to work, but it ended up being way better than I thought.

I laid out trash bags under the area where I was going to be working to not dye the carpet blue.

Dying the Yarn

This is definitely what took the longest. In my head, I thought I would be able to make a large batch of dye and drop all of the yarn into it at the specific heights to match the mountains. It turns out, yarn is relatively large. I had to make way more dye that I had planned and I had to dye much smaller sections.

So it took a section of the lower mountain range and placed it into the prepared dye (prepare the dye as per the packaging). I set a timer for 30 minutes and moved on to the next section. The lower level of mountains took about 4 sections of dye.

After the timer went off, I took the section out and put it in clean water for 15 minutes to rinse it out. After the 15 minutes was up, I drained the water and put the yarn back in the container to keep it from getting water everywhere.

Then for the 2nd layer of mountains, I followed the same process, but when making the dye I doubled the amount of water. I wanted to create the gradient look so watering down the dye achieved that look for me.

For the last layer, I had painted the final mountains. I did this for two reasons:

1. There was too much yarn to gradient dye in containers, it would have been a waste of water and dye
2. I was afraid that dying it would make the final layer too dark and I wanted to control the color

So I took a sponge brush and dye with nearly triple the amount of water and began painting at the top right below the tape. I wanted to create a crisp line at the top of the mountains. Then I filled in the dye down to the 2nd level of mountains. I did this on top of a cut up cardboard box to prevent dye from getting on the floor and I could fully saturate the yarn.

Let it dry & hang

I hung the final piece to air dry for a few days before doing any touch ups.

After it was dry, I planned out where I wanted it on the wall with a stud finder and tape measure. Then I used large curtain rod hooks to hang the dowel on the wall. And here is the final product!

Check this out on my saved instagram stories!