You’ll love making this sweet and simple rainbow necklace craft with your children using your button stash. It’s an easy and straight forward activity that gives a great result!
Have fun and rock the rainbow look!
Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day?
Saint Patrick’s Day is well celebrated in Wellington. Combine a large Irish community with a national love for dressing up and you’ve got yourself quite the party going on in the coolest little capital of the world.
What still surprises me after living in New Zealand for all these years is that EVERYONE gets into it. On Saint Patrick’s Day (or any other occasion) you’ll see more people wearing green, rainbows, clover pins, leprechaun hats and a whole variety of creative accessories than not. I LOVE it!
Which is why we can’t stay behind, even if we don’t make it further than preschool or the supermarket that day. By Saint Patrick, we will be dressed up for the occasion!
My little girl and I were both thinking accessories first and match our outfits later. Since necklaces and rainbows are both such favourites in our home, we had our Saint Patrick’s Day activity sorted straight away.
When we do a craft activity in our family, we usually start from an idea, then collect any material we think we can use and make the rest up as we go along.
Read along below as I’ll talk you through our process and you’ll see how you can easily create your own Saint Patrick’s Day rainbow necklace!
How to make a Rainbow Button Necklace
You’ll be needing a few materials, here’s what we used:
- needle (small enough so you can thread through button holes, the eye should still be big enough for you to put embroidery floss through)
- embroidery floss: green of course!
- buttons: get your entire collection out
- a clasp to close your necklace: you can tie a know or use something more fancy like the ‘lobster claw’ we used (you can see it in an image below)
- scissors
Ready? Here we go:
We started by started by looking through our massive button collection and sorting out the colours of the rainbow:
red – orange – yellow – green – blue – indigo – violet
We sorted them in little piles, so we had options to choose from when making our necklaces.
We cut off some embroidery floss, about the length of an arm and threaded it through the needle, which was a lot harder than it should be: small needles tend to have small eyes too!
I started threading the first button and quickly figured out that we needed to find a way to keep all the buttons stay put. Simply threading them and let them hang against each other would look nice too, but not what we were aiming for today. See for yourself what you like best!
We decided to thread through the button holes twice. If the button only has two holes, you can thread it two or even three times and it will be nicely secured on your string. If the button has four holes, you can thread the embroidery floss through twice, crossing over at the front and improvising a little knot at the back by threading it through a third time. See how we did it here:
Work your way through all the buttons, spacing them as you see fit. When finished, you can decide how long you want your necklace to be.
We noticed that if you keep it long, the buttons easily tangle but when you make the necklace shorter, they nicely stay seated against your collarbones.
Making the necklace shorter did mean we had to use a clasp since it wouldn’t fit over our heads with a knot.
We used a lobster claw and simply tied a couple of knots to secure it.
Having a necklace with a ‘grown up’ clasp did seem to be a big deal for my daughter. In one little step we upgraded from children’s jewellery to adult jewellery. Oh yes.
She probably spent more time trying to master the closing and opening of her necklace clasp than she did making the necklace itself!
We both made one and now are the proud owners of a mother and daughter pair of rainbow button necklaces! My little girl LOVED it! She almost did a happy dance when we went into town wearing our almost matching outfits and necklaces.
Oh, the simple ways in which you can bond with your daughter!
Wishing you Good Luck, and lots of it!
The rainbow is a perfect harmonic combination and in many cultures and myths a symbol for good luck.
May that be true for all of you!
If you’re looking for a fun Saint Patrick’s Day activity, this looking for gold in the rainbow sensory tray is a sure winner and you can find all our rainbow activities here.
Have fun!
Ann*
Want to pin this post? You can do that here!
So sweet! Where did you get all your buttons?
Years of craft hoarding, lol! I also have this habit of taking off those spare buttons you often get with new clothes and I remove all buttons before I get rid of old clothes (I usually recycle the fabric somehow).
We made some rainbow necklaces this week as well! ๐ I love these. Maybe we need some more…one can never have too many necklaces! At least, that’s what my three year old thinks. haha
“One is none” as we say in Belgium! Will have to check out yours … my little girl likes to have options!
These necklaces are really pretty – thank you for linking up with the Frugal Family Linky!
Thanks Helen, we do like pretty!
Ann,
Ik zal aan je denken op 17 maart. Jammer dat die hier passeert zoals elke gewone dag.
Patrick uit Bilzen
Wij gaan vooral aan jou denken op jouw naamdag Patrick! We zullen het volgend jaar in stijl vieren als we terug zijn!
a very sweet, delicate looking necklace! Thanks for sharing at our Facebook Share Day!
Thank YOU Susen!
I do the same thing with the spare buttons! and I have a button jar – which makes for great fun! Wonderful idea – especially the grown up clasp! Love it
Yes, gotta have a button jar! Buttons are probably our favourite loose parts. I would argue that EVERY creative project has use for a button somehow or somewhere!
A gorgeous necklace. Thanks for linking up to #familyfrugallinky
Thanks Nicola, hope you’ll be celebrating well this year!
Stopping by from Sat. Evening Family Free For All Party. This is so sweet, I’m pinning for a fun project with the girls. THANKS for sharing. Carrie, A Mother’s Shadow
Thank you, I hope your girls will love it!
This is beautiful! Thanks for allowing me to share in my St. Patrick’s Day Roundup ๐
Thanks Shannon, you’re welcome and it’s a great round up (everyone go see!).
Wow, what a great necklace…I love it!
Thanks Trixi, we’ve been rocking our mother/daughter matching set!