Lovey Dovey Buttons

I've been wondering if I could use recycled plastic milk bottles to make buttons, and thought to try it today with some of the left over love heart print.

This post about how to make a fabric button made me wonder if I could make the pieces from recycled plastic, instead of buying the kits from the craft store. Buying new something so simple just to make a button seems wasteful to me. I had three goes at making the pieces from the plastic, going smaller and refining it as I went. My result is, I don't think this makes a very strong button! You could use it as a decorative button only, not a functioning one on clothing. I also cut and covered a small piece of plastic to form the missing piece for an old fabric button, which worked ok.

So then I went back to the net. This post about how to make a fabric button without a kit prompted me to go through my large button collection for any faded buttons that were candidates for a fabric covering. The large once-were-purple buttons worked the best, the smaller faded blue ones were more fiddly. By trial and error I found the smaller ones really need a round of cloth that was neither too small or too large. I also watched this video on making fabric buttons with a kit, it looks very simple and I wonder if I could make my own. I really like the picture frame on the wall behind her, it's holding 4 rows of cotton threads, looks cool! (wonder if I could make one from recycled materials ... )

So that was a productive day today - I learnt how to cover buttons with fabric! I'm sure to need that skill at some point ....

edit: I'm thinking of trying to make fabric covered thumbtacs when I've collected enough tiny plastic bottle tops (eg. toothpast etc).