45 Button Initial

I love to make fun wall art to put into some dollar store frames and I'm pretty obsessed with monograms and initials on anything and everything. Then I realized I actually had quite a few green buttons and rhinestones from scrapbooking and magnet-making and my bedroom is lots of green, so I came up with this little project... I had that sad "but I invented this.... how is it already on the internet?" moments when I saw this one, but I'm still posting my tutorial (if you can even call it that because this is tooooooo easy)!

Supplies

• Letter template/stencil
• Cardstock
• Buttons
• A few rhinestones
• Hot glue gun and a few glue sticks
• Dollar store frame

Instructions
I still don't have a fancy cutting machine, so I printed out my first initial on some cardstock and then cut it out with an X-acto knife. (In case you're wondering, I used Museo font - it's free online, at least for the 300, 500, and 700 weight versions.) Then I used that cut out stencil to pencil a very thin outline of the letter onto my cardstock background. You could skip this and just start gluing your embellishments onto the letter you print out directly, but I was worried about that ink showing through and/or smearing. (You can barely even see the pencil lines in the photo below, but they are there, I promise.)

Once I had that traced I just started gluing down my buttons and rhinestones. I sort of laid them out a bit before gluing them, but only a couple buttons or rhinestones at a time. I made 3 little rows of them here - one row of embellishments on that left margin, one on the right, and then one that overlapped or connected the buttons from the left and right margins. (I numbered them in the photo below and glued them down in that order - the ones on the left first, then the right, then the ones on top.)

I just kept gluing and didn't worry too much about the glue gun strings... at least not yet.

And kept gluing until I had my complete "M." Then I just sort of started cutting the strings of glue off and occasionally erased a light pencil light or weird mark I'd gotten on the paper - somehow I can never keep my projects super-clean.

Then it was time to pop it into my dollar store frame and admire my work!

I'm linking up to some of my favorite conferences here.