Recycled Art - Skull made from buttons

A couple of years back, I became obsessed with making art from recycled odds and sods.  I also became quite obsessed with skulls and such like.  Ok yes I may have a bit of an obsessive temperament.

I had a massive jar of buttons, begging to be made into something, and I collected more unwanted buttons from friends (and their mums and their grans).....and scored a massive win in a charity shop.

The first thing I did was sketch out the skull shape I wanted.

I then cut a huge piece of canvas, and painted the whole canvas.

I sketched the skull roughly on top of this, and then just bust out the needle and thread.  A bit hard going on the fingers, even with a thimble, but very therapeutic.

The canvas is about the size of a single bed.  Sewing all the buttons took me most of the summer.  I did it mainly on the kitchen table, and it was like a massive communal jigsaw puzzle, with anyone who came round wanting to pick a button and choose where it went.  (it was quite difficult for a control freak like me to deal with this!)

A lot of the buttons are the spares from our old clothes, so its quite nostalgic, as I can remember the kids wearing the clothes first time round.  The kids also chose a few of their favourite buttons to sew themselves, which they like to point out.

Its difficult to photograph the scale of the picture, but its over a metre high.  Its not everyone cup of tea.....we had one friend whose daughter asked for it to be taken out of the room as it was scaring her and she couldnt sleep!