Button Bracelets

I know I said my first submission would be a recipe or my attempts at following a Maxi skirt tutorial I found on Pinterest, but I've been suffering with a horrible viral throat infection for the last 3 weeks and it isn't showing any signs of going away any time soon so I have about as much energy for crafting as a flat battery.

So instead, I'm sharing this silly little bracelet thing I made. I'm MAD about buttons at the moment. They are all over the place and I've been going crazy on ebay buying all sorts of buttons for all the different button-related crafting projects I've been finding on Pinterest - watch this space for a Button Tree, Some button-related jewellery and cardmaking.

Full details of the Button Bracelets after the break

I bought a cheap set of bracelets in Primark to go with an outfit and one of them was this lovely elastic bangle made of round wooden disks. I got to thinking that one made out of brightly coloured buttons would be lovely. So I went looking on ebay. Now I both love and hate ebay - I hate that people can scam you so easily but I love that you can buy craft stuff so cheaply and in such large quantities - have you SEEN the prices in Hobbycraft recently? Anyway, I happened to find THESE in my browsings and I LOVED them. I love the colours and the size is just perfect (15mm). So I ordered them. But being ebay and coming from China I didn't expect to see them much before August to be honest. But to my surprise they arrived yesterday morning and whilst I'm lacking energy for larger crafting projects, this was right up my street - a little sit down with some elastic and a bowl of buttons in front of 'Green Lantern' on Sky Movies. As it turned out both bracelets took me about 20 minutes from start to finish, so I ended up painting my finger and toe nails and doing some nail art too so all in all a pretty productive evening (I never just 'watch' a film, I have to be doing something at the same time). They've turned out so well I shall be buying more buttons - the seller sells them in quantities of 600 too :-)

So onto the bracelets:

The buttons arrived all mixed up with a good mix of colours so I was really pleased

I thought about making a 'random' bracelet (and still might) but the Sari Maxi skirt I'll be making is bright Cerise so I'd really like a matching pink bracelet.

The first thing I did was split them into colour groups - Pinks and reds and Yellows, greens and blues.

The elastic I have is the perfect thickness and it's nice and stretchy but it is HORRIBLE at knotting - the knots come undone by themselves but a drop of superglue seems to do the trick. That being said I might have to look into something a little slimmer.

Being twin-holed buttons, when I threaded them onto the elastic, they sat unevenly and twisted around:

So I decided to double up the elastic and thread through both holes - this resulted unfortunately in two knots (see above comment about the poor knotting ability of my elastic) which I deliberately put on opposite sides of the bracelet to avoid a 'knot lump' or gap in the bracelet which you'd see if both knots were together:

However once the superglue was dry and the ends trimmed, I tugged the knots until they were positioned inside the holes in the buttons and voila:

I was so pleased with how it turned out that I made two:

So there we are. My first craft post. The next post will be the slow-cooker Steak and Guinness recipe (with my basic beef and mushroom casserole one thrown in for good measure).

Lex.