Button Tree Canvas

So as soon as we found out I was pregnant, I started looking up craft projects to do. My excuse was that the more that I did, the more love the child would feel. Of course, I know the child would feel loved even without a bunch of handmade stuff from mom around, but it sounded like a good reason to find more craft projects at the time.

I found a million pictures of button trees on Pinterest and decided that is what I wanted to base the baby’s nursery around. Well, plans have since changed and I have decided to do a more jungle/safari theme with a few trees thrown in for good measure.

Just like my plans changed for the whole theme of the room, my plans have also changed for how I will mark the nursery. I was going to make a ribbon wreath, but since we are in a foreign county and will be moving before our child has a full nursery, I decided that I would do something with a little more structure for the time that we are here. Thus, I decided that this was the perfect time to create one of these button trees. It will hang on our spare bedroom, which will also be where we are storing all of our child’s clothes, diapers, etc. when they are not in use.

So the next step was to find a tutorial on how to do this button tree. Yes, I could figure it out all by myself, but I wanted to make sure that I was using the correct supplies and all that jazz. Well, Pinterest was actually no help here because all of the links that were on there were just pictures of people’s final projects. Alas, I remembered this little website called Google, which tends to have just about everything on it!

Here is the link to the tutorial that I found that I will be basing my project off of: http://artbywiley.blogspot.com/2012/03/button-tree-tutorial.html

**Warning I will be doing quite a few things differently for this project than the tutorial that I just posted the link for, but that is because I am working with a specific kind of button that I bought and a bigger canvas. There are lots of ways to do different variations of this project though.**

Button Tree Canvas

Materials Needed:

*A Canvas (I got mine at a local discount store, but most craft stores sell these as well. I also found this website: http://www.dickblick.com/products/blick-academic-58-profile-canvas/ that has some pretty good prices on craft supplies, and their canvases are pretty cheap.)
*Acrylic paint (I used Folk Art Acrylic paint for this project because I trust that brand, but any acrylic paint will work. You will also need to get as many colors as you plan to use. I used two colors, one for the background and one for the tree.)
*Paintbrushes for painting the background of the canvas (if you wish to) and the tree.
*Any paint supplies that you usually use when painting (a cup of water, rag, paint palette, etc.)
*Buttons (I bought a bunch of value packs of buttons in similar colors because I knew I wanted blues and greens for my project, but any buttons will work)
*Craft Glue to attach the buttons (I used Tacky Glue because it is something that I have at the house all the time, but I am sure that any kind of craft glue or even super glue would work for this project.)

Instructions:

1. Coat the canvas with the background paint. Make sure that you paint all over the front of the canvas and get the sides of the canvas as well so that it all blends together and looks nice and uniform. Make sure to wait until the paint is completely dry before moving it or working on the tree portion of this project. **NOTE: When I paint, I like to hold the canvas until I get to the last side. I paint over newspaper as to make sure that I don’t get paint all over the place and then when I do want to work on the last side, I place the canvas on a jar so that the canvas is not drying on the newspaper(that can leave you with remnants of the newspaper hanging on to your canvas and those can be a pain to get off).**

2. Once you are sure that the canvas is dry, it is time to start working on the tree. I looked all over to find a stencil of a big tree so that this part of the project would be easy for me since I am not good at freehand painting, but could not find anything online so I did the next best thing I know how to do, I asked a friend who is good at painting if she would paint the tree for me.

Here is what the tree looked like when I got the project back from her.

3. Now comes the fun part: planning out where you are going to put the buttons on the canvas. I just set the canvas on the table with a big pile of buttons all around it until I figured out exactly where I wanted all the buttons. Once, I figured out where I wanted all of the buttons to be placed, I took a picture with our camera so that I could remember where I had wanted the buttons to be placed in case I needed to move the canvas at all (This step was unnecessary in my case, but I always like to be over prepared and not need to be.)

4. Once you have figured out where you want to place all the buttons, it is time to start gluing them into place. I left each button where I had placed it and removed one at a time. Once I had removed the button, I placed a small amount of Tacky Glue on the back and then placed the button back on the canvas where I had just taken it from.  A little glue went a long way in my case, but you may need to use more than a little dot of glue for your project.

5. You are now done with the front of the canvas and it is time to hang the canvas. If you want, you can follow the directions on the other blog to put the hooks and wire on the back of the canvas, but I decided that was too much work(and unnecessary since I was hanging this on the door) and therefore just bought a plastic door hook (like the one to hang a wreath with) and used that.

Yes, I added a lot to this tree after my original picture. I just felt that it needed more than what I had originally placed on the canvas. Let me know what you think and I would love to see pictures of your project if you decide to make one of these as well!