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*

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