How to Make a Button Bracelet

Hello, Internet. Do you like making jewelry? Are you curious about how I make my button bracelets? Want to see some pictures of some stuff? Well, you're in the right place!

Here's how I make a Little Tree Jewelry Button Bracelet. You can find and purchase my bracelets at my Etsy Shop.

SUPPLIES:

• Needle Nose Pliers
• Chain Nose Pliers
• Wire Cutters
• Rope Chain (at least 7 inches of it. This is 3mm rope chain, I believe, but you can use a different kind and/or size if you feel strongly about it.)
• Clasps (I use lobster clasps, but you can use whatever kind of clasp tickles your fancy)
• Open Jump Rings
• Wire! (I use 22g nickel silver wire; I've found that anything thicker hurts the hell out of my fingers, as I do a lot of the wire work with my hands, and anything thinner is too flimsy and easily bent)
• Buttons! (Seriously, I have waaay too many buttons. I love them. They are my friends.)

1. PUT TOGETHER THE BRACELET BASE:

1. Cut the chain to 6.5"
2. Add lobster clasp to one end with an open jump ring
3. Connect the other four jump rings and add them to the other end of the bracelet.

Note: If you do not know how to attach jump rings to jewelry, go look it up. I promise you it is very simple, and there are tons of free, fast tutorials on how to do it.

2. PLAN YOUR BUTTON LAYOUT:
Next, I set out my buttons in a rough semblance of how I want them to end up on the bracelet. This is a little bit trickier with gradient bracelets, like the one I'm doing for this tutorial, because you have to make sure you have enough space for each color to blend evenly into the next.

Don't ask my why I decided to use a difficult example. I like to live dangerously.

So anyway, all the buttons you see heaped into a colorful pile in the first picture? This is what they look like once they're spread out in order:

If you're not doing a gradient bracelet, just spread the colors and sizes out evenly throughout the bracelet. Notice that I put the larger buttons in one row on the bottom, and the tinier ones in another row along the top. This way I can make sure I have even distribution of both sizes, and don't end up with a cluster of teeny tiny buttons.

3. READY A BUTTON:
Cut a piece of wire about 10" long (honestly, you can cut it to whatever length you want, this is just the average length to which I cut mine), and bend your wire like so (you can bend it at 1.00" and 1.25" if you want to get technical about it):

And slip it onto your button like so (notice that the flat part goes on the face of the button, the part you want to show to the world):

Then, bend the short wire across the long wire and wrap it around the long wire. I do this with my fingers, it's the same thing as a wrapped loop, for which you can find a tutorial by Googling "How to make a Wrapped Loop." :)

Next, you do the exact same thing with the long piece of wire. About 0.25" from the button, bend the wire at a 90 degree angle, loop it around your needle nose pliers, and STOP!

This is very important. If you finish off this wire wrapped loop, you will have a fancy button with some wire on it that cannot be connected to the chain. This is very frustrating. So don't do it.

Next, grab the bracelet and loop your button through a link!

Secure the loop with your pliers, and wrap the long piece of wire around itself, completing the Wire Wrapped Loop of Doom.

BAM!

 Now cut that long piece of wire off, and flatten the loops with your chain nose pliers.

And you have just secured your first button to your button bracelet! That wasn't so hard, was it?

Yeah, it's kind of time-consuming. But that means you'll end up with a bracelet full of buttons that are virtually impossible to dislodge if they get caught or snagged on something.

So, now you have one button attached, you can do the process another 29 times. Granted, the number of buttons you use on a bracelet can vary depending on how big the buttons are and how full you want the bracelet to look, but that's about the average number of buttons on my Little Tree Jewelry bracelets.

And here's the finished product, the Color Blast Button Bracelet:

Have fun!