How To: Make An Abstract Button Picture

What Can I Do With My Spare Buttons?

Why not make a piece of abstract artwork to brighten your wall?

I had a nice selection of buttons in beautiful shades of green, brown, stone and cream. They were in a variety of styles and sizes, and some showing signs of their age and use.

They reminded me of the colours of grass, earth and rocks, which led to the idea of a simple picture of layers of earth and rocks that you see in strata at the beach sometimes, or at archaeological digs.

I spent some time working out a pleasing composition, first with pencil and paper, and then with the buttons themselves to achieve a balanced look to the final piece.


I laid out one line of buttons at a time and carefully used a needle to mark their positions through the sewing holes. The buttons were then removed and set aside in the correct order. The pinprick marks were pushed all the way through the mount board to form sewing holes. Where there was a button with a shank, (just a handful in the whole picture), I used a hollow metal punch and hammer to make the hole.


I then sewed that line of buttons to the mount board using some vegetable-dyed embroidery yarn from The Natural Dye Studio. I preferred to sew the buttons in place rather than gluing them, because they are not damaged in making the piece and also, they were made to be sewn!

The marking and sewing process was repeated with each line of buttons, then I signed the piece and gave it a title: “Earth Strata”.
The approximate dimensions are: - 9 11/16" (24.7 cm) wide x 8 13/16" (22.5 cm) tall.
Why not raid your button tin and have a go at your own mini artwork?
Copyright Julia K Walton 2008