What Can You Do With Buttons?

Do you have oddball buttons hanging around in your junk drawer, or perhaps tucked away in an old canning jar? If so, perhaps you’re wondering what you can do with them.

There are zillions of possibilities.

Of course, the most obvious use for buttons is sewing them to clothes and using them as closures, which is their intended purpose. But if you want to do that, it’s ideal to have a set of matching buttons — and if you’re dealing with vintage buttons, you likely don’t have a matching set with as many buttons as you would need for mending a shirt, cardigan or jacket.

And, obviously, you can’t just run to the store and buy more. Depending on the buttons in question and how common that button style is, you might be able to find other similar buttons if you spend time scouring the internet or antique stores for matches — but it’s unlikely that you’d find exact matches.

So what do you do with oddball, unmatching buttons? And what can you do with extra special, unmatching fancy buttons like the Czech glass buttons pictured above?

Whether your buttons are plain, fancy, old, new, plastic, glass, metal, shell or something else, I invite you to check out this page of button crafts. You’ll find suggestions for bunches of different things to do with any oddball, mismatched buttons you might happen to have hanging around.