DIY Christmas gifts! 2011
My plan was to save some money, but still give great personalized gifts. Here are my results:
For my mom: She's redecorating an old extra bedroom to be her sewing room. I found this frame at Goodwill for $3. Boy was it dusty! But the size was just about perfect for what I had in mind.
For my mom: She's redecorating an old extra bedroom to be her sewing room. I found this frame at Goodwill for $3. Boy was it dusty! But the size was just about perfect for what I had in mind.
I bought a box of buttons off eBay. I had NO idea how many to buy, so I figured go big or go home, right? So I bought a 2lb box of mixed white/cream/opalescent buttons on eBay. With shipping, $16.49. My plan... I used PowerPoint (shocking, right?;) to decide on the shape of the letters. I wound up using a couple different fonts to get the look I wanted. I traced the letters out onto muslin (from my wedding!) in pencil and used plain old Elmer's glue, bit by bit to fill in the shape. Now, my PLAN was to run a quick stitch through the button holes, then run it through the washer to get rid of the pencil marks. That was a big ol' fail. The glue dried way too hard to force a needle through. So Christmas Eve I had to redo the whole thing on the fly. I cut that piece of muslin up into pieces to try and transfer the buttons one by one, and get them in the right shape. It wasn't a perfect success, but I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
Here's the restarted point:
Here's the restarted point:
I will say that I kind of wish I'd picked a different colour button. There wasn't really any colour the opalescent buttons would really pop on, and I chose the opalescent ones because I thought the shade variation would look nice, rather than sloppy (like some other colour may have looked).
And finished:
And finished: