Wrapped Wire Word Art

What do you get when you mix one part wire with one part yarn and a dash of hot glue? A fun weekend project and a new piece of art! You might remember me expressing my love for word art in this post and watching me create the wire lyrics to our favorite song here.

Well here’s the latest addition to our wire word collection – my first yarn-wrapped word!

You may have noticed we’ve been loving all things French lately, and since Amour is French for “love,” it seemed like a fitting choice for this piece. I actually took enough photographs of my process that I was able to create a stop-motion video just to show you how I did it. Want to see?

If the video player doesn’t show up for you, try reloading the page or follow this link to the video on my flickr page. I’d love it if you watched it! It’s like 28 seconds long (and there’s fun music), and it shows the whole process from start to finish.

The wire I used was a pretty heavy gauge since I wanted the word to be sturdy as I started wrapping it with yarn. I didn’t have any long lengths of thick wire on hand, so I used 3 pieces of wire that were about 12-16″ long each and just twisted them together on the ends.

The wire word was mostly formed by hand, but whenever I needed a really tight crimp I used needle-nose pliers to get the job done.

Like my first attempt at wire words, I free-handed the letters for this word – no template necessary.

You can see where the 3 sections of wire are joined in the image below. I knew that I would have to pay special attention to those joints when I wrapped the word with yarn to disguise them as much as possible. The type of yarn I used? Basic turquoise acrylic, found at a thrift store for $1 (and I have waaaay too much of it left)!

To keep the yarn secure as I started wrapping, I ran about an inch of yarn along the wire and then wrapped the long end of the yarn around both the wire and the tail end of the yarn.

No need to glue or tie the yarn down if you wrap tight enough!

When I reached spots where I would have had to pass the entire skein of yarn through a small opening (the top of the A and the center of the o), I skipped them and moved on down the word. I would come back later and fill in the gaps with a small bundle of yarn instead of the entire skein.

This project was mostly trial and error, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to disguise those wire joints with the yarn. After the first pass with the yarn, I knew I’d have to wrap the word a second time to conceal the bumps in the wire.

Here’s how the word looked after the first pass with the yarn. At this point, I wrapped the end of the “r” really tightly and started working my way back across the word with the yarn for the second pass.

I love how the second pass with the yarn really made the letters stand out. You can see how well the second wrapping also disguised the joint in the wire at the beginning of the “r.”

After the second pass, I cut and temporarily taped the end of the yarn at the base of the A.

Then I cut a small bundle of yarn from the skein and used it to wrap the top of the A, going all the way around the opening twice.

Then I repeated the same process with the o. You can see how I’d almost completed the first pass around the o in this image.

Finally everything was wrapped and it was time to secure the loose ends of yarn. To prevent unraveling while I worked on other parts of the word, I tied off the ends of the yarn.

Using hot glue, I secured about 1/2″ of each tail of yarn to the back of the word. I made sure to get glue on several loops of yarn on the back of the word to make the yarn as secure as possible.

After trimming the ends, all I had left to do was decide where to hang my wrapped wire word art!

Since we just hung four of our favorite prints from our trip to Paris, I thought this fun French word would fit in perfectly at the end of our hallway.