When I find myself with a day off with no obligations I usually end up reaching for my current cross stitch WIP. But for some reason it just wasn’t calling to me the other day, so I ended up rummaging through my craft cupboard for inspiration instead. What I found was this adorable container of buttons I couldn’t resist buying at Michael’s awhile ago.

I had no real plan for these when I bought them but have since seen a number of chainmaille button bracelets and thought these would work well for that. So out came the jump rings.

I started with a simple base chain of single jump rings. I used 18 gauge (SWG) rings with a 5/32 inch inner diameter. The final chain was 40 rings long (I think the one in the picture is a little longer, but I ended up removing a few rings at the end). Attach a closure of your choice to one end of the chain.

Next comes the fun part, start attaching buttons. I didn’t have much of a system for this. I had seven different sizes of buttons, so I simply tried to alternate larger buttons with smaller buttons. I used whatever size jump rings I happened to have that would nicely fit through the button and base chain without leaving too much extra ring. (This is a great project for using up random left over rings from other projects!). I tried to alternate adding buttons above and below the base chain, although, since the chain twists, this became harder and harder to do as more buttons were added.

I added a single button to every ring of the base chain except three rings on either end, which helps make the bracelet a little easier to put on. Here’s the final result:

Pretty cute, right? I don’t wear a lot of costume jewellery, so if I made another one I think I would only use smaller sized buttons, but since the goal here was to use up the buttons I had, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I think there’s also a lot of room to vary the sizes and colours of buttons to achieve different looks. I’m picturing a bracelet starting with the largest buttons in the middle working out to smaller buttons on either end instead of the randomly positioned sizes I used. I guess I’m going to have to go shopping for more buttons. So much for actually clearing something out of the craft cupboard!