Artful Thursdays: Buttons of Love, a Valentine Ornament

I've been inspired by Julie Collings and her wonderful blog the adventures of bluegirlxo and am ready to take on her Artful Thursdays challenge. She's come up with this fabulous idea to pick a project every Thursday, using the treasures we've collected and finally use them. As many artists, I've managed to hoard collect lots of treasures with art projects in mind but never find the time to do them. This challenge will force me to make the time and work on it while meeting one of my goals for 2010, which was to focus more time on creative self-expression. My dear hubby will be happy too, as this may lead to some de-cluttering that he is always hopeful for.


So let me present to you my first project with tutorial for Artful Thursdays,

Buttons of Love



List of supplies I started with:
1. an oval shaped paper mache ornament left over from a previous project
2. vintage sheet music, cardboard left over from some packaging, ivory cardstock
3. one of my many jars of buttons
4. star dust glitter
5. a tiny piece of satin pink ribbon and vintage trim
6. red ink pad
7. heart punch by marvy
8. silver pipe cleaner
9. foam square adhesives and craft glue

First step was to glue the sheet music to the thin cardboard then punchout a heart from it. Then I inked the heart with red ink.



I then applied glue to edges of heart and oval ornament and rolled it through the glitter.


I trimmed and glued a piece of lace trim to the top of the oval, sorted through my buttons (deciding on an ivory, pink, and red color pallette), glued buttons covering the front of the oval.



I printed out "LOVE" on the ivory cardstock, trimmed it into a strip, followed with a second strip a bit longer with "v" cut outs on each end. I inked both pieces in red, adhered "Love" to the strip with foam squares, making a small banner. I attached this banner to the heart using more foam squares to give the piece some dimension.



I made a small hole on each side of the ornament at inserted silver pipe cleaner to make the hanger.



I attached the heart to the buttons with foam adhesive, tied the pink satin ribbon in a bow on the pipe cleaner, heat treated the ends of the ribbon to keep from fraying and Whaaa Lhaaa! You now have a very cottage chic valentine ornament to spruce up some small corner of your home or a perfect gift for a friend.



You can find this one in my etsy shop.