These unfinished cabinet door frames have been laying around in our basement for over a year and I was finally determined to do something with them. Photos on Pinterest of people using buttons to spell out letters had been popping up in my feed, so I thought I could spell the word JOY with my three frames.
Here's where I can save you a ton of time...since my door frames didn't have panel inserts, I had to make my own panel out of some scrap sheetrock we had laying around. Plywood would have been a better option but we didn't have any and I wasn't going to waste the fuel to go to the home improvement store when the sheetrock that was laying around would work just as well. Lucky for you though, you could use regular old cabinet doors with a panel still intact!
I had this really great turquoise burlap that I wanted to use, but burlap has a very loose knit making it especially see through. So before I wrapped my burlap around the squares of sheetrock, I painted the sheetrock with a few coats of a similar turquoise paint that we had on hand, this way the white sheetrock wouldn't show through the burlap. The wood frames got a few coats of antique white paint and some van dyke brown glaze to age them.
After the burlap was wrapped around the sheetrock, I placed it in the painted wood frame.
I don't have a fancy letter cutting machine, so to make the JOY letters, I simply printed each letter off on my printer and cut them out. Since the letter would be painted red, I traced the letter pattern with a red marker to create the outline.
Here's what my letter looked like after tracing it onto the burlap.
Using red metallic acrylic paint, I filled in the letter. This is an important step because if you just use buttons without having the letter painted underneath, the letter will not look very solid because the buttons can't possibly cover all of the space.
Joanne's sells large packs of different colored buttons - I grabbed both of these packs so I could get some different sizes.
Before I started hot glueing anything, I laid some buttons out on the letters to practice a bit. Some people layer the buttons, others just do a single layer. I opted for the single layer when it was actually time to glue them down - mostly for my safety since I burnt my fingers about 100 times in the process with the hot glue.
After all three of my letter were complete, Brent used hardware like you see below to hook the frames to one another.
We love our new holiday art and more importantly, we love that we did it for about $10!
