Love on a Canvas

Remember that blank canvas I hung next to Mr. Pavo Real while I waited for inspiration to strike?

Well, feast your eyes on this!

It all started when my friend Brittany suggested I try my hand at a button monogram pillow. I loooved the idea and ordered a bag of mother of pearl buttons for about $10 from etsy. The more I thought about it, though, I thought the button monogram would be a really cute idea for the canvas hanging above the armoire, especially since my original idea to do a meaningful quote had pretty much been scrapped when I realized that a quote on the canvas plus a quote on the chalkboard might be a little too much of a good thing. Plus the likelihood of a cat chewing off all the buttons was significantly lower on the wall versus on a pillow. So the graphic + easy to DIY + cat proof nature of a button monogram canvas was perfect.

I cute a scrap piece of linen to fit my canvas and printed out a big ol’ letter T to use as a template for placing my buttons. Fortunately, I had the foresight to test out the button arrangement ahead of time. Turns out these buttons weren’t going to stretch as far as I’d hoped.

Hmmmmm….what to do. I printed the T out in a smaller font and tried again.

My buttons still were not providing ample coverage, and I feared that if I shrunk my T any further it would look dinky on the 11×17 canvas. I needed a plan B. I pinterested (just made pinterest a verb. like googled. it was inevitable) “button art” and discovered lots of lovely ideas, but these two (by etsy seller Cloth and Patina) particularly caught my eye.

Cloth and Patina

Cloth and Patina

And so I was inspired. I went ahead and stapled my linen around the edges of the canvas and then laid out the buttons to spell “Love.” Then, I took a scrap of ivory cotton, folded it in half, and cut out what I think of as a hipster heart, the tall and skinny kind as opposed to short and round (like me). I used my sewing machine to stitch around the outside edges of the heart so it would look like it was sewn on, but since my linen was already stapled to the canvas it wouldn’t be sewn in real life. I used craft glue to adhere the buttons one at a time, then ran a bead of glue around the perimeter of the heart and stuck it on there.

I let the glue cure for a few hours before hanging it up to admire.

My only regret is not flipping the buttons over to all show their pearly sides, which I think would look a little prettier. If I get real ambitious one of these days I might just check and see how strong that craft glue really is. If it’s not too difficult to pop off the brown-ish ones and flip them over then I’ll be on that like white on rice. Overall, I’m really pleased with it. It balances out the neutral tones in the bunny silhouette without being too matchy-matchy, and of course it ties right into the white cotton and oatmeal-ish linen bedding. I even ended up with 18 buttons leftover. Any ideas about what to do with those? It’s my dream to someday have enough mother-of-pearl buttons to fill a big jar and sit on a shelf. Like this: