How To Thread Crafting String or Twine

While working on a recent project I came up against a problem.  See that adorable little house above?  Notice in the peak on the right hand side there is a tiny hole visible and there’s one just like it on the other side.   Yeah well, I realized that now that I had that house (and 13 others) all constructed and glued together I was going to need to run a length of decorative Baker’s Twine through that hole and out the one on the other side so these cute little houses would be suspended on the twine like a garland.

 

This is the method I came up with.  Some uber clever crafter has probably already discovered this, my apologies if I’m being redundant here, but this is what I did to get those houses on a length of twine and not go crazy in the process.

We’re going to make a “needle” on the end of the twine.  I cut about a 4″ piece of 28 gauge wire.  You can use a larger gauge wire (which, by the way, is conversely a smaller number i.e. 18 gauge is much thicker) if you will be threading a larger hole.  But, the holes on these houses are 1/16th so, thin wire was needed.

Starting about an inch up on your twine, pinch/press the end of the wire down onto the twine with your thumb(nail) and tightly twist/wrap the wire down the length of the twine until you get to the end.

Sorry, the twine I was using had silver thread twisted in it so this made for a bit of a confusing photo shoot, but hopefully you can see the wire twisted down the twine.  Now you will have about three inches of wire continuing on off the twine.  Get it good and straightened out and then trim the wire to whatever length you will need to thread your project.  I only needed about 2½” inches so I snipped off the extra.

Tiny house meets needle threader.

Wire going in one hole…

…and out the other.  It was very difficult to see the hole looking into the inside of the house and hit it with the wire so I just held up the house – kept the wire level to the hole’s placement on the other side and found my mark pretty easily actually.

By grabbing the needle I was able to pull the twine on through – voila!

Once, on one of the houses the wire slipped off the twine as I was pulling it through.  I simply straightened out the twists from the first application and re-twisted the wire back on the twine.  It worked great.  And now for an oldie but a goodie:

necessity is the mother of invention

phrase of necessity

1. 1.

   proverb

   when the need for something becomes imperative, you are forced to find ways of getting or achieving

   I’m reasonably certain a crafter came up with that line.  Craft On