A Basket of Buttons

This project was born out of a need for a Vacation Bible School craft and a love for buttons. I truly wish I had pictures of button baskets that the children made that year at VBS, but someone else took the pictures of them. Somehow I never manage to get a copy of them. We had close to 150 children make a simplified version of this. Each one was as unique as the child that made it. My poor craft helpers spent hours helping sort, bag, and prepare over 50 pounds of buttons before the children every got them, and my dear father got roped into drilling the holes in the all the wooden bases. We had some good times of fellowship over those buttons, however many of them I fear thought that their leader was over ambitious, crazy, and total unrealistic of what the children were cable of doing. (They may have been right.) The kids on the other hand loved the challenge and thrived on my belief in them that they could do it.   

 

I have taught adults to make these too. It is always a fun class full of laughter and amazement as each individual basket takes on it’s own design. No two ever turn out the same.

 

This particular button basket was made specifically for my mother. I used copper wire instead of the floral wire used in the VBS baskets, and I also chose to use a nicer base.  A major part of the fun in making one of these baskets is in the choosing of the buttons. The possibilities seem endless. Using all white and older styles of buttons on my mother’s basket gave it more of a classic look.  Basically, she ended up with another pretty knickknack to dust instead of a woven basket with many possibilities of usefulness.