Speaking of buttons, there are a lot of really cute and innovative crafts you can make with buttons.
As a crafter, I literally have five mason jars (darn those mason jars!) filled with buttons, most of which date from the 40s and 50s. Even though I don't sew. People just keep giving me their grandmother's old button collection, and I can't turn them down.
Even if you don't have a ton of your own buttons, you can buy huge collections of buttons on eBay. I bought a pound of random buttons once, years ago, long before people started giving me their family heirloom collections. It was a pretty good deal! Of course, I used like four of them, then put the rest of them - you guessed it - into a mason jar, where they remain to this day.
For some reason, buttons are one of those things where we as a society have far more than we need. So why not use some of them to make one of these cool crafts?
Sew them to cards as a cute embellishment. You could also glue them on, but I have bad luck gluing buttons onto things. And the sewing makes for a cool texture on the inside, as well. This site is in Portuguese but seems to have basically the same idea, using buttons to add a 3d element to your cards.
Use them to embellish clothes. You want to be careful with this. A light touch is best, like just a heart over the breast pocket. Done right, you could end up with something like this Alexander McQueen tank. (Done wrong, you could end up with an embellished sweatshirt.)
How about making a lampshade out of buttons? You could end up with a lot of cool effects if you chose only transparent buttons, same-color buttons, etc.
Button bracelets are a popular craft. In one style, you link all the buttons with an elastic thread. In the other, you sew the buttons to a cloth strip. Both are cute!
0 comments