Ta-dah! Tuesday - Badge Heart Art

This is another idea I've had languishing in a folder for ages - before the invention of Pinterest even  (shock horror!) but have had to be slowly gathering supplies for. I have no idea if Brigitte Herod was the first to make one of these pictures with retro badges - that would be like establishing who got in first with the scrabble tiles idea - but her badge heart at Rockett St George was the first one I found.

Who doesn't feel a pang of nostalgia for their childhood when they see all the brightly coloured badges - I know I had quite a collection from places we'd visited when I was a kid, but sadly when I found them a few years ago most of them had gone rusty. However, I bet you don't feel enough of a pang to pay £175 for one of these pictures! When I checked the Rockett St George website yesterday, they had stopped selling the small version, but they did have an enormous 120cm square canvas version - only £1,500! Want to see?

If you want one, they're available here

Despite the sad loss of my World Wildlife Fund and Walkers crisps badges from my youth, I did still have quite a few badges knocking around, as some years ago I made my own version of a Topshop bag (er, with badges on) and I just dug it out of the back of a cupboard. The few extra I needed came as part of a job lot from eBay, and I also found some I'd got with NME years ago. If you don't still have your childhood collection, you quite often see baskets of old band pins to rummage through at boot sales, market stalls and sometimes vintage shops. Children's birthday cards are another fertile source - how many 'I am 4' badges does one kid need  anyway?

I forgot to take a before photo, but I'd bought a nasty Next Homes type picture from a charity shop - a pine box frame with some uninspiring dead twigs and skeleton leaves in. Ripping out the foliage tore the back cardboard, so I covered it with some turquoise wrapping paper (£1 from Paperchase) and painted the frame white. I arranged the badges as well as I could and then hot glued them in place one at a time. If the back of the badge was very deep, I added a bit of blue-tack before glueing over it. If you don't want the picture to be permanent, you could probably just use more blue-tack and skip the glue altogether.

My version. For not £175

I think these are easier to do if you have a selection of different sized badges, I had a few larger ones but mostly they are the typical small button size. Having a variety would make it easier to fill in any gaps, but I don't think it came out too badly. Not quite as good as the £175 version, but a lot cheaper!

So, what have you been up to? I'd love you to link up your latest ta-dah! posts. Please link back here so others can join in.

Lakota x