Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Autumn Button Bracelet

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A couple of years ago, I started collecting button pictures on Pinterest. Something about them appealed to me after giving a tray of them to my littlest girl to entertain herself one day. Initially there were very few pictures on there but then suddenly a raft of them began to appear and before I knew it, I had a proper Pinterest board full of button creations! But it was once I saw my lovely friend June making some of her amazing jewellery using buttons that I knew I had been on trend ahead of time 😉

We’ve had a good go at making pictures from buttons but I thought I would try a bracelet, just to see how possible it was for someone not terribly skilled in complicated things. I gathered together a palette of colours first, planned out some combinations in order so it had my requirements for ‘organised random’ and then threaded them on to clear elastic, starting at the middle. Each pair of buttons is held together by the threaded elastic which goes through the holes from back to front and back again, going through the 4 holes to form a cross.

My handy hints are:-

Start in the middle and try to pick buttons with 4 holes. By threading in a ‘cross’ through them, both top and bottom buttons, they’ll stay secure and won’t slip.

For this jumbled look, pull the elastic fairly tight so there aren’t spaces between the button stacks.

I always finish a bracelet on elastic with crimps, even if its just a quick child’s bracelet. It’s so much better than having a pile of beads or buttons on the floor after an hour of zealous stretching 🙂

So having made my quick and simple version, I sent a picture of it to lovely June from Goddess Jewels and asked her if I could showcase her talent. And blow me if she didn’t respond with a beautiful version of it, done properly! June has used wire to give this a more organised look and she is going to do me a tutorial next week to put here. How fantastic is that?

It’s a great opportunity to show you some of her work, which I am frequently in awe of as I just do not have the patience for the fiddle nature of wire and beads.

I just think this tropical button bracelet is so beautiful. (So beautiful I bought it actually!)

And I love this button necklace too, an incredibly elegant piece of jewellery.

I’ve known June a very long time and many of my friends have now bought bracelets from her. She has a real knack for putting together combinations that work beautifully and the bracelets are a work of art and feel incredibly nice to hold and wear. I can’t wait for mine to arrive as the ones I’ve seen are just so tactile and gorgeous. Do take a look at her shop, I think you’ll be hooked.

If you want more button craft ideas, click on the picture above to go to Pinterest 🙂

 

Rainbow Storage Jars.

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Following on from the success of the flower Fimo jars last week, I had an urge to try out rainbows on jars too. I had an idea in my head of a candle votive decorated in coloured spirals and thoughts it would be fun to experiment with a few designs on some small jars. I quickly found that Fimo Classic or Sculpey Premo was the best type of polymer clay for this; while Soft clings well to the jars, it is too hard to get a neat rope from it. I’ve not done a lot with Premo in the past but I suspect I’ll be coming back to it as I really enjoyed working with the purple colour I used.

Fimo is ideally suited to quick rainbow making as it comes in the perfect colours, so no mixing required. The only blending I did was to make the slightly more muted leaf colour on one of the jars, otherwise these are straight out of the packet.

My first attempt was the one second from the left, which is fine but I rushed and wasn’t too pleased with. After that I remembered seeing Starless Clay on Etsy once, so I had a look at her for inspiration. I adore her work and am hopelessly jealous of her talents but I used her for inspiration (I hope she will be flattered not annoyed!) I didn’t attempt any of her fancy filigree or marking of the spirals but did cut chunks out of my spirals with a circular cutter and fitted them together that way. It was surprisingly easy to do that, I can’t work out if I’m naturally talented with circles ( ;)), lucky or there is some circular mathematical magic going on I don’t understand.

After that I used some other small sized cutters to make a random jar covered in geometric shapes to see how far you can stretch the requirement for the Fimo to loop around the jar to hold it all in place. It did work but one of my girls broke it before I varnished it to make it stronger. Fun though and a design I will probably come back to.

Last up was the flowered one; I just loved the rainbow palette of colours for this, it really seemed to work in a perfect, natural balance. The flowers and leaves could easily be made by hand but I stuck to cutters for speed and a uniform look to it all. It’s given me an urge to try some crewel style designs in polymer clay.

Lastly, Maddy stuck much more firmly to the rainbow brief in her version, which is a change jar decoded with a rainbow (and blue bird) and a photo of her when she was little. She’s going to do a step by step blog post on how to do this soon.