Button Heart Art

A friend had a large jar of white buttons left over from a tradeshow and brought them to the house to see if I could use them for something.  (I'm beginning to think the habit of people cleaning out their garages and bringing their treasures to me is just an excuse for them not to go the dump, hmmmmm.)  ``At any rate, here's what I came up with .  Festive for Valentine's Day or a wedding gift, but subtle enough to leave up all year.

MATERIALS

Buttons

Heavy paper (I used watercolor paper)

Sewing machine and thread

Glue

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STEPS

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Create your sewn border pattern on the paper just as if you were doing it on fabric.  I liked the look I got by adjusting the machine to  make a longer stitch.  I used ivory thread on white paper to compliment the white buttons, but did another version with red thread that looked just as good.

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Start sewing on one edge and just work the paper around the sewing machine creating a wavy line around the entire page.  Then just overlap it and do it again and again. I made my lines very wavy so they overlapped here and there to look very organic.

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Cut a heart out of a scrap of paper, position it and lightly trace the shape on the paper with a pencil.

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Using craft glue, lay a thick bead of glue along the pencil line.

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Lay a row of buttons on your glue line.

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Once you've created your outline, lay another line of glue closer in and repeat the process until the heart is completely filled in.

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Now that it's filled in, I went back and added a few more bottom on top of the first layer to create some depth and fill in any gaps.

Place it into a nice deep frame with a matt and your new piece of art will look like a million bucks!

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