I Heart Buttons!

Just as the Beads, Buttons and a Sprinkle of Glitter title would suggest, buttons are one of my joys. Never mind making me micro happy, they make me massive happy! So, dear reader, imagine my super duper excitement when I found a little box of buttons my marvellous Grandma gave me a few years back. I had lost them, and then my some mystical buttony force, I found them in my junk room and immediately started thinking about what I could make with my little gems.

After much deliberation, I decided to make this hanging button heart to add a touch of button love to my new home.

In my unprofessional opinion, its the little touches that do it- The large touches make a house, but the little touches make a home :) . By filling my home with handmade goodies, it's like filling my home with care, love and time taken to create. Mmmmm handmadeness.

These are the steps I took to make my hanging button heart, but of course, you can adapt and alter as you please.

1. Like a magpie, search for all the colours you like and group together approximately 20-25 buttons of a similar size. This is the step you can personalise the most- for bigger or smaller hearts use more or less buttons, and for a quirky feel you could try different sized or even different shaped buttons.

2. Cut a length of wire (I used beading wire with a 34 gauge, but that was just because I had it to hand. Next time I will try a slightly more sturdy wire as this was a little too flimsy for my liking) about 30cm long. This will not be the circumference of your heart but it's better to have a little extra and then you can trim the ends.

3. Thread on your first button to the bottom of the wire, leaving a 5-8cm 'tail', as you will use this to secure the strand at the end of your project.

4. Thread the wire through one hole of the first button, threading from behind, bring it through, thread it back out from in front, through the adjacent hole. Did that make any sense? It did to me but reading it back it sounds more tricky than it is. Hmmmm, comment if this causes you any real problems and I'll try and explain it better (chance is a fine thing!).

4. Do this threading technique with all your buttons.

5. When you have threaded all your buttons, twizzle the ends of the wire together, quite tightly, so that you have a wirey buttony circle, and trim off any excess.

6. Shape the wire circle into a heart (or any shape you fancy) and attach ribbon, wire or string for hanging. I used wire again, purely because it was to hand, and attached it to the top of the heart by wrapping the wire round the buttony wire a couple of times.

Taaddaaaaa!! A little touch of button love.

Toodlepip! xx