How to Make Jewelry from Old Buttons

There’s a tin in almost every house I visit. Sometimes it’s a biscuit tin. Sometimes it’s a jam jar. But it’s always the same thing inside: buttons. Nana’s buttons. The spares that came attached to a coat you threw out in 2011. The odd one that survived a cardigan. We keep them because tossing them feels wrong, and we never use them because we don’t quite know how.

So let’s use them. Today we’re turning that tin into jewelry — brooches, pendants, earrings, the lot. It’s a brilliant first project. The materials cost next to nothing, the tools are things you probably already own, and you can finish a piece in under an hour. Honestly, it’s the closest thing to instant gratification that a craft gets.

Materials List

• Buttons — a handful, in mixed sizes and colors. Shank buttons (the ones with a loop on the back) work beautifully as pendants. Flat two-hole and four-hole buttons are your workhorses for stacking and brooches.
• Jewelry wire — 0.6mm or 0.8mm craft wire is ideal. No wire? Try strong beading thread, or even dental floss in a pinch for a temporary fix.
• Jump rings — small ones, around 5mm. If you don’t have any, you can make your own by wrapping wire around a pen and snipping the coils apart.
• Earring hooks, brooch pins, or a necklace chain — pick whichever finished piece you fancy making. Charity shops are goldmines for cheap broken jewelry you can cannibalize.
• Round-nose pliers and flat-nose pliers — two pairs makes life much easier. One pair plus patience also works.
• Wire cutters — old nail clippers will do at a push, though they’ll blunt quickly.
• A cocktail stick or small dowel — for wrapping neat loops.
• Clear nail varnish — optional, but a thin coat stops cheap plastic buttons from looking, well, cheap.

Step-by-Step

I’m going to walk you through a stacked button pendant, because it teaches every technique you’ll need for the rest. Once you’ve made one, the brooch and earring versions are just small variations.

1. Sort your buttons. Tip them out and group them by size. Pick three or four that look good together — a big one for the base, a couple of smaller ones for the middle, and one tiny one for the top. Don’t overthink the color matching. Clashing is charming here.
2. Check the holes line up. Stack your chosen buttons and look through the holes. You want at least one pair of holes on each button to align, so your wire can pass straight through the whole stack. If nothing lines up, rotate the buttons or swap one out.
3. Cut your wire. Snip a piece about 20cm long. That sounds like a lot, but you’ll trim the excess later, and working with a short piece is fiddly and frustrating.
4. Thread the stack. Push the wire up through one hole of the bottom button, then through the matching hole of each button above it. Bring it out through the top tiny button.
5. Bring the wire back down. Now feed the wire back down through a different pair of aligned holes, so the buttons are held by two strands rather than one. This stops the stack from swiveling around like a loose wheel.
6. Tighten and twist. Pull both ends snug so the buttons sit flat against each other. Twist the two wire ends together at the back of the stack, close to the bottom button, and trim to about 2cm.
7. Make the hanging loop. Take the twisted tail and wrap it around your cocktail stick or dowel once, forming a small circle. Twist the end to secure it. Slide the stick out. Congratulations — you’ve just made a loop.
8. Attach your hardware. Open a jump ring by twisting the ends sideways (never pull them apart — that weakens the ring). Hook it through your wire loop and through your necklace chain or earring hook, then twist it closed.
9. Neaten everything. Tuck any sharp wire ends down flat with your pliers. Run your thumb over the whole piece. If anything snags, file it or bend it in.
10. Seal it (optional). Paint a thin layer of clear nail varnish over the front of the buttons. Let it dry completely — about twenty minutes — before wearing.

Beginner Tips

Here’s what I see go wrong in almost every workshop, so you can skip straight past it.

Don’t use rusty or chipped buttons. They look charming in the tin and terrible on a necklace. Rust will also stain your clothes and your skin. If a button’s metal shank is green with age, leave it out.

Don’t skip the second strand of wire. I know it’s tempting to just thread once and be done. But a single strand lets the stack spin, and spinning buttons on a pendant look sloppy within about a day.

Watch your wire length. Too short and you can’t grip it. Too long and it tangles into a bird’s nest every thirty seconds. 20cm is the sweet spot.

Don’t pull the wire too tight. Snug, not strangling. Over-tightening cracks plastic buttons and can snap old ones right through the middle. You’ll hear the crack before you see it, and there’s no fixing it.

Test the jump ring before you close it. Give it a gentle tug once closed. If it opens back up, it wasn’t properly seated, and your pendant is going to fall off the first time you lean over a sink.

Creative Variation

Once you’ve made a few stacked pendants, try the memory brooch — a piece built from buttons that belonged to specific people, arranged in a cluster rather than a stack.

Here’s how it works. Gather five to eight buttons that all mean something. Your mum’s coat buttons. One from your own first school cardigan. A stray one from a friend’s sewing box. Lay them on a table in a rough circle or an oval, overlapping slightly, and shuffle until the arrangement feels right. Then wire them together side by side — a single strand passing through adjacent buttons, weaving back and forth across the cluster. Attach a brooch pin to the back, and you’ve got a wearable piece of family history.

My slightly controversial opinion: don’t label it. Skip the note on the back saying which button came from whom. You’ll remember, and the mystery makes it more interesting when someone asks. If you truly want a record, keep a note in your phone instead of engraving it onto the piece.

Troubleshooting

The buttons won’t sit flat. This usually means your holes aren’t aligned properly, or one button is domed on the back. Add a tiny seed bead or a washer between the offending button and its neighbor to level things out.

The wire keeps snapping. You’re probably using craft wire that’s too thin, or bending it back and forth in the same spot repeatedly. Go up to 0.8mm, and try to make each bend once and leave it.

The jump ring won’t close flush. It’s been stretched open. Work it back and forth gently with two pliers until the ends meet, then squeeze. If it still gaps, swap it for a new one — they’re cheap and not worth fighting.

Your pendant hangs lopsided. Your hanging loop is off-center. Re-wrap it, this time positioning it directly above the middle of the stack rather than wherever the twisted tail happens to land.

The buttons look dull and plasticky. That’s the nail varnish job. Two thin coats, fully dry in between, gives a lovely soft sheen. Skip the thick single coat — it goes cloudy.

An earring is heavier than the other. Weigh them in your hand before you commit. If one side has a chunkier button, add a small bead to the lighter one to balance it out.

And if something goes completely wrong? Take it apart and start again. Buttons are forgiving. Wire is cheap. Nobody’s grading you.

That tin of buttons has been sitting there for years waiting for a purpose, and honestly, it’s been waiting for you. Start with one pendant. Wear it out. See how many people ask where you got it. Then make another, and another, until the tin is empty and your jewelry box is full of small, strange, personal things that nobody else owns. That’s the whole point of making, isn’t it? Go and dig out the tin. I’ll be here if you get stuck.