DIY Mini Button Flower Bouquet Tutorial

As promised, here is the tutorial on how I created my mini button flower bouquet. To refresh your memory, here is the finished piece…

So, let’s gather what we will need. You are going to need:

1. A glass salt or pepper shaker. Preferably you are going to want to find one that just looks cool. I’ve been collecting these whenever I can find them, either at garage sales, estate sales, antique stores, or thrift stores.

2. A bag of pearl beads. I got mine at Hobby Lobby for $2.00 (priced $3.99 and then half off).

3. Buttons, you will need one button for every “flower” you are going to make. This is a personal preference, just pick whatever you want. I wanted mine to look vintagey and to stay in a black and white pallet so my buttons are all white.

4. Scrapbook paper or any other paper to cut your flowers out of. I chose a paper that is actually a print. You could even just use pages from an old book. If you want to do colors, just pick some paper you like.

5. A flower punch. I had mine from Stampin Up and it was the perfect size. It made 3 different sized flowers and I used 2 of them, the 2 larger ones.

6. Wire. The wire will need to be strong enough to stand upright, but flexible enough that you can bend it. I just used what I had which just happens to be 17 gauge wire for electric fencing…hey it worked!

7. Wire cutters and pliers.

8. A hole puncher.

OK, so you have it all gathered? Let’s get started. The first thing I did was just fill the salt shaker with the pearls.

Then, I just cut my flowers out of the paper using the punch. After I cut out the flowers, I punched a hole in the center of each one using my hole puncher.

Then I looked for some buttons to match up to the flowers. I actually love the ones I picked.

So, now it was time to assemble my flowers. I just guestimated at the length of the wire, but basically you want it a little longer than what the finished flower will need to be. Then I thread one end of the wire through one of the holes in the button. Bend the wire at the end and thread the end through the other hole in the button. Like this:

Then I took my pliers and clamped the wire together and thread both ends through the hole in the middle of the paper flower.

At this point I just kind of experimented with it and figured out a way to make everything stay secure. In the end I just took the wire and bent it straight across to basically hold up the paper flower. If there was any wire sticking outside of the flower I just trimmed it with the wire cutter.

The last step is to just put one flower through each hole in the salt shaker lid. Now I will admit that I wish this one has a few more holes so I could add a few more flowers, but this one just had the 6 holes so that is the number of flowers I could add. I’m super excited about some of the others I have because they have tons more holes to fill with flowers. I think it’s a judgment call though. You can either fill each hole with a flower or just fill it as much as you would like. So, let’s take a look at the finished piece again.

And, here she is in her new little cubby in my PB cubby wall hanging.

So, let’s sum up cost and time. Total cost of this was: $3.00. Now to be fair I already had the buttons, paper, punches, and wire so they didn’t cost me anything. All I had to buy was the salt shaker (which I got at an estate sale for $1.00 and the pearls which I already mentioned I got for $2.00). Total time from the start of gathering supplies to putting her in the cubby was about 30 minutes (which includes experimenting time figuring out how to secure the flowers on the wire.) Not bad for a cute little vase, is it?