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Saturday, March 1, 2014

First DIY Button Necklace

For the last month, I've been all about buttons. You know; collecting, sewing, gluing, and generally being on a kick ("kick" being that I find a new thing and obsess.) Since I now own a million buttons, I want to do stuff with them.
As per my usual routine, if I don't have an explicit idea, I do a search on the interweb for inspiration. Pinterest and Etsy were overflowing with it. Most of the pieces were pretty detailed. This is one of the first things I pinned:
find source
That shit's awesome. Go ahead Google button jewelry, if you like wasting time with DIY porn. I remembered my crafting/sewing mantra: keep it simple, stupid. As I stated in my last post with a ten point list, I'm kind of a lousy crafter. It's ok, that's my "thing";  a craft blogger who sucks. But, I continued with my plan and assembled my supplies.

Buttons (duh), some eye pins, some large jump rings, some big pliers, and little jewelry pliers, and a chain. Here's the thing: those aren't the right jump rings. They don't work. Rather than waiting until I had the proper supplies, I decided I would try and use the eye pins (those long, pin like things with tiny loops on the end) to attach buttons to the chain.
In  the interest of keepin' it easy, I chose a theme. I went with a favorite color combination; aqua and gray. So, I chose a bunch of buttons in various tones of those two hues. I really like teal, so the few buttons I had like that were the first I chose.
I'm not doing a big tutorial, here, because I don't recommend this technique. I started in the middle on my chain (by the way, I decided to use a different one than the one pictured) and added my first button. I pushed the eye pin through the back of a hole in the button and used my little pliers to twist the pin around a link in my chain. I used those big-ass pliers to break off the excess. 
Next time, I using jump rings. That would be better.
Then, I put a gray button the left, and a gray button to the right, and continued with a pattern. The first button I used was a bigger, shiny aqua one. I decided to layer it by attaching a darker colored one next to it and sewing them together.
I'm not totally in love with my end result, but I'm satisfied because it works and I learned that next time I can use the right supplies. And I'll never run out of the buttons. Here it is:
Maybe...MOAR BUTTONS


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