If you ever wondered what to do with any retired Stampin’ Up! buttons and others you may have, here is a fun Button Pumpkin Board you can easily make! All of us crafty people certainly have a stash of buttons somewhere, and if you don’t, you know you can buy some online or at the craft store. Years ago Stampin’ Up! sold buttons for embellishments and I had lots of them. Maybe they went along with the period of time when Stampin’ Up! sold fabric, which I also still have!
My friend’s friend sent her a picture of this idea, so my friend bought a board like this one and got out her buttons. If you want a cute decorating tip, she put her buttons by color into glass jars and then set them on a metal tiered tray! She used mostly brownish buttons for her pumpkin.
Of course when I see a cute idea like that, I have to make it too! If you saw my Facebook post the other day about the pickles, this is what I ordered from Walmart….this board! And when my order was delivered the next day, I got a heavy package on my porch. When I opened it, it was a giant gallon jar of the biggest dill pickles I have ever seen!
Luckily, I got a refund through the Chat online for the board, my friend took the pickles to the food pantry at her church, and I picked up the board at an actual store in the afternoon! I’ll never forget this funny story!!
I just dug around in the closet, where fortunately my daughter a few years ago had organized a lot of my craft stuff so I just found the boxes that she had labeled “Buttons”. As I said, I had a lot of Stampin’ Up! buttons plus a bunch of other buttons, some from the Quilt Show I used to go to every year downtown from projects I never made, and just random other buttons. A long time ago my mother-in-law had bought a tin of buttons at a garage sale she gave me for crafting. I sorted through all the buttons and set aside the containers or loose buttons I thought I might use.
You can lightly sketch a pumpkin shape on the board if you like or not draw anything. If you are sure your pumpkin outline drawing skills are not up to par you can google “pumpkin coloring pages” and print out one. Cut it out and trace around it. Easy peasy. Then just start glueing on buttons inside that shape!
My friend told me to use E3000 glue, which I did, but I hated the “fumes” and smell. She thought hot glue would not stick to the wooden board but I don’t know. The next day when I added more buttons, I used hot glue although not many were glued directly onto the board. But it seemed to work, so far!
Think in terms of layering the buttons. There’s no rhyme or reason, no way to do it wrong. If you don’t have many buttons, make a smaller version. Use any color(s) you want. After I mostly had my pumpkin “finished” I decided to stop and come back to it later. I needed to get away from it and see if I liked it as is or work on it some more.
The next day I got out more buttons and added more orange buttons and made the stem with green buttons. You can see I used all sizes of buttons. If you aren’t sure about this, lay out the larger buttons and then start filling in with medium and smaller buttons. Then glue buttons on top, overlapping, to cover up any spaces or maybe put small buttons in the center of large buttons. Just play around with it!
I would have put raffia on my pumpkin but I didn’t have any so I used some old Stampin’ Up! ribbon and frayed the ends. When I was making the stem, I didn’t have enough green buttons so I colored some plain white ones with a Stampin’ Blend marker. It dried almost instantly so easy to use. You could probably use a Stampin’ Write marker, too.
Overall, this was a fun and easy project, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I hung it up on the wall behind my baker’s rack when I was putting out my Halloween decorations yesterday. I think I’ll be able to leave it out over Thanksgiving because it’s not a Halloween jack-o-lantern. Another idea if you have some picture frames, you could cover the background with cardstock, designer paper, or fabric and use that for a background for the button pumpkin. For me, it was easier to order something new than to plow through a pile of old picture frames to see what I had. You could make very small pumpkins with maybe just one color of small buttons. So many possibilities! If you make one, leave a comment or email me and let me know how it turned out!
