Button Bouquets!

I've already sung the praises of Craftgawker, but can I just remind you how much I love it? I'd seen this project multiple times before (it's not a new idea), but I was re-inspired by a Mother's Day that was approaching without any gift ideas in my brain.

Enter the button bouquet. There are a kajillion tutorials for all different types of these bouquets online, but I found the ones at WhiMSy Love and Blue Velvet Chair to be the most helpful.

Unfortunately, I don't have an abundant supply of miscellaneous buttons, so I raided my mom's stash (classy, I know. I stole her supplies to make her gift. Judge all you want.) and was able to put together a fun little variety. I wanted a little more than just the buttons, so I also added in some scrapbook embellishment flowers to about half of the button flowers, and I just love the way they turned out!

**Just a note about the flower embellishments: Since they didn't have two holes in them, twisting the wire to secure the flowers just made them slide down, so an easy fix was to add a very small button as the base and the problem was solved.

Here's my mini-tutorial:

{Supplies}

• Green floral wire (I used 24 gauge, and the smallest package/spool was way more than enough)
• Buttons (I made 30 flowers with 3 buttons each, so if you're not good at basic math, that would be 90 buttons)
• Flower embellishments (completely optional; I used plastic, but felt would work also)
• Mason jar for vase (save those spaghetti sauce jars!)
• Ribbon/hardware for vase
• Clear marbles for vase filler (you could use whatever filler you want though; I found the best deal on these marbles in the floral department at Hobby Lobby, 50% off, of course!)

{"Flowers"}

• I started by sorting through buttons and putting different combinations together. The color schemes are endless! (Well, endless depending on your supply. Nevermind.)  I used three buttons for each flower. You could always mix it up, using 2-5 for each, but I'm a little obsessive and couldn't bring myself to not be consistent. I have issues.
• Once I had my buttons ready to go, I cut all of the wire at one time. 13ish inches was a good length, but you might need to adjust based on the height of your vase. You can always trim up the length when you're done with all of the flowers so you have some height variety in your bouquet, so don't get too worried about the length of your wire yet. 
• Then thread the wire through one button hole of each button (send lots of excess through also!), bringing the excess back down through the other hole.
• You should have a couple of inches of wire to twist tightly around the stem.
• And there's your flower! Repeat for as many flowers as you want to make.

{Vase}

• Be creative with your vase! I used mason jars, but I've seen some precious button bouquets made to fit into more unconventional items like salt shakers. I'm also planning on making a bouquet for myself using a glass Coca Cola bottle as a vase. 
• For this particular vase, I just tied a thin ribbon around the jar opening, including a little charm hanging down from the knot. Then I hot-glued my fingers the coordinating wide ribbon to the bottom of the jar. Hey, I was going for simplicity, but you could be as creative or as simple as you want to be.

• When I went to arrange the flowers, I found that it was much easier to adjust the height of the flowers while I held them in a bunch in my hand. Once I had them arranged to my liking, I trimmed off the ends and tied the bunch of stems together with floral wire. Then I set them in the vase and filled it with marbles. Easy breezy.