An Easy To Make Button Necklace

On a recent trip to the picturesque city of Wells (the details of which can be read here). I picked up a tin of buttons from a charity shop. On a side note - it was a Quality Street tin which in my experience is by far the nation's favourite container to home buttons once the chocs have gone, as such if I see the familiar glimpse of white and pink in a charity shop or car boot sale my heart does begin to flutter.

Among the treasure inside the tin were these 5 buttons...

They're leather with small sections of thin wire for decoration. They are shank back buttons where the actual shank is a puffy circle of fabric protruding from a hole in the back. There's probably a technical name for them but I don't know it.

Anyway, I thought they'd make an interesting statement necklace so decided to give it a go and it was dead simple.

You will need:

Large buttons- shank ones are good for this but not essential, holed buttons will work
Strong glue (e.g. E6000)
Chain with fastening (e.g. a lobster clasp)
2 jump rings
Pliers (to attach jump rings)

I arranged them until I was happy with the look of them, basically a downward v shape.
I removed the the fabric shanks with scissors.

I then glued them by overlapping so that the bottom button (the point of the v) is lowest, the adjacent two are glued on top on the lowest one. I also put a spot of glue between the edge of these two sticking them together for a bit of extra strength. Then I glued the uppermost two onto the middle two.

I wrapped them with low adhesive tape while the glue dried completely (I left them 24 hours in this instance). Once I was happy they were securely stuck together I removed the tape.

It's then just a case of attaching the chain.

To keep it simple, I just attached a jump ring to each end of chain and glued one to the back of one of the uppermost buttons and the other side to the opposite button.

Again leave to fully dry and then you're all done!

What do you think? Not bad for for a simple make with unusual buttons in my opinion. I'll update with a photo of it being worn when I don't look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards ;-)

Until next time, craft in earnest! Craftin' Ernest x