Make your own holiday decorations from buttons and burlap
We’ve been shopping at our local Greater Sioux Falls ReStore in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for years, and searching through the aisles is like a treasure hunt for us. It’s actually the only place we go now when we are in need of un-framed mirrors and solid core doors — you can always find a great bargain on these!
Today, we are talking about repurposing kitchen cabinets; more specifically cabinet door frames. (You’ll also find a huge selection of these at most Habitat ReStores.) With the holidays quickly approaching, some simple holiday decorations made out of the cabinet door frames, buttons and fabric seemed like a fun project to tackle.
We prefer to work with what we’ve got, so we usually round up as many things as we can from our stash of reclaimed materials that we have lying around. This meant we only had to purchase buttons and some picture-hanging hardware for this project.
To begin, we sanded and painted these unfinished cabinet door frames with two coats of antique white paint followed by a coat of brown glaze, which gives them an aged look.
Since we weren’t working with a cabinet door that had a panel in it, we had to make our own. Luckily, we had some scraps of drywall lying around that worked perfectly!
The plan was to wrap the panel in burlap, but burlap has a very loose weave which meant the drywall was going to show through. To remedy that, we painted the drywall with a few coats of a similar color of paint as the burlap — a turquoise, in this case.
Once the paint on the drywall was dry, we wrapped the burlap around the drywall and then placed it in the frame.
Before we started applying the buttons, we wanted to paint the letters onto the burlap. It’s very difficult to cover every space with round buttons, so painting the letter onto the fabric first in a similar color to the buttons allows for small areas of the fabric to show between the buttons while still maintaining the solid shape of the letter. To transfer the letter shape onto the fabric, we simply printed letters from our printer and cut them out. Using a red marker to match the red paint we were going to use next, we traced around the letter to get the shape.
Once we had our letter shape outlined, we used red metallic acrylic paint to fill in the remainder of the letter.
We found large packs of buttons in all sorts of colors at our local fabric store. We grabbed a couple different sizes so there would be large ones to cover big spaces and little buttons to fill in the tiny gaps.
Now it’s just a matter of getting all of those tiny buttons hot glued to the painted letter — this part is sort of tedious, but don’t give up!
All of the framed letters should be complete at this point. We wanted to hook our three frames together vertically, so here is the hardware we used to attach them to one another.
We hung our button art on the wall next to our Christmas tree where we can enjoy it all season long!
Heidi and Brent Kruse, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, enjoy creating DIY projects. Repurposing and upcycling is their passion and hobby. Follow along with their projects, big and small, on the Kruse’s Workshop blog and find them on Facebook.