Add some button Christmas art featuring a cardinal bird to your home décor! So easy to put together that even young children can make this winter craft.

Ever since my son was a toddler, we have enjoyed making button crafts together. With the setup we had, the finished pictures always turned out great, and we gifted them on numerous occasions to aunts and grandmas. It was a win-win: fun for my son to make, and a pretty picture for someone’s fridge. As he has grown older, we have moved onto different projects, and it has been over a year since our last collage.

That was until a month or so ago, when I saw someone selling button art on Etsy. The three-digit price impressed me immensely! I even shared it with my husband with a comment that our toddler could very well have struck a deal with the best iva company and would have paid off our mortgage if we had put him to work, making button art pieces for sale. I was joking, but it has been a while since our last button project, the upcoming Christmas required some gifts, AND we have a brand new toddler who likes making art. So we took out our buttons to make some winter button art.

So, what would say winter?

A snowman? We’ve done it before. Mittens? Check it right here. Christmas tree? Also accomplished. I had a lot of buttons in red, which is my favourite colour, and so I decided to make a cardinal, who is my favourite bird and who often makes an appearance on Christmas cards. The kids, by the way, chose to make rabbits, in pink, but that’s coming later.

Materials You Will Need

The post contains Amazon affiliate links to the products we used

• paper with the printed design (you can download ours below or make your own)
• hobby knife (scissors will do as well, but it’s easier to cut in the middle of a sheet with a hobby knife)
• packaging tape
• buttons (red & brown)
• plastic jewels and rhinestones 
• glitter

How to Make a Cardinal Button Craft

Watch the video in this post for a detailed tutorial or follow the steps below!

1. Cut the bird shape out with a hobby knife and scissors from the template.
2. Apply overlapping strips of packaging tape to the back of the paper so that their sticky surface is exposed in the cutouts. This is the main trick: everything will stick to the tape only, forming a nice crisp silhouette.
3. Cut the cardinal’s mask out of the bird shape you cut in step 1. Attach it to the tape in the right place.
4. Attach buttons and beads. It works better to start at the edges first and then fill in. The kids will probably do it randomly, and that’s just fine. Gives the finished piece some character.
5. Sprinkle glitter to fill in the spots that are left, after all the buttons are in place.

You can see that I first made the bird on a black sheet of paper, thinking that red will look nice against black. But it lacked the wintery feel, so I tried again with white, which I found more satisfying.

But here they both are for you to compare and choose which one you like better. If you decide to go with black paper, yes, you can print on black: the ink shows well enough to cut the silhouette out.

You can scale the picture down and create handmade button cards – or display this as a piece of art in frame. In that case, I often put the plastic insert behind the picture to showcase its transparency instead of in front of it. If you have two pieces of plastic, securing it from both sides will be best.

Now, the last question you might want to ask is how long the picture would last. It mostly depends on the packaging tape, but I do have the very first collage my son made over three years ago in a pretty good condition. When an odd button falls off, you can always stick it back with a bit of double-sided tape, but the majority of them stay put surprisingly well

Make your own picture with the template below!

Do you like silhouette crafts? Check out our Silhouette Christmas Bundle. The book is a collection of various ideas for Christmas-themed silhouette crafts—ornaments, lanterns, cards, tags and toys. Altogether, there are  fifteen silhouette crafts with over sixty pages of printable silhouette designs. Print and make—it’s that easy!

Play board games, dress paper dolls, read and colour pages, while at the same time learning geography, history, and folklore, with the Christmas Around the World bundle.