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Crafting with VHS Tapes

How to Make Pipe-Cleaner Button Displays

Lee Meredith, contributor

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I made this sculpture to look like a tree with buttony leaves and button flowers around the base.

Lee Meredith

These are the only two materials you'll need for this simple project with infinite creative possibility.

Lee Meredith

Buttons stay on pipe cleaners where you want them, making these two objects perfect for each other!

Lee Meredith

I made this sculpture to look like a tree with buttony leaves and button flowers around the base.

Photo: Lee Meredith

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After brainstorming this concept while trying to think of unconventional button projects, I sat down to try out the idea and ended up building four different sculptures—it was so surprisingly fun playing with pipe cleaners, I didn't want to stop! This is obviously a great project to do with kids, but I also recommend it as a craft project to bring out your inner-child-crafter. I felt like I was rediscovering what it was like to make things for fun as a little kid, with nothing but the simple bendy pipe cleaners, a pile of buttons, and my own imagination!

You'll need:

• Pipe cleaners
• Buttons

There really isn't any right or wrong way to do this project—the concept is simply to build a sculpture with the pipe cleaners, with all (or most of) the points sticking out so that you can push buttons onto the tips. You'll need to pay attention to balance—when you add the weight of the buttons, your sculpture may tip over if it's not evenly built and bottom-heavy. There are many ways to go about construction; here is one way...

Start by weaving some pipe cleaners together to create a base.

I got this weaving idea from a Craftypod podcast by CraftStylish blogger Diane Gilleland. (Listen to it while playing with your pipe cleaners for inspiration!) Once you have some woven together, push them all in toward the center to make a more solid base.

I chose all shades of green/yellow for the base to look grasslike.

Next, I went around in a not-very-precise manner and wove the ends around through the strands to make the base bigger. My main purpose here was to create very short sections of each pipe cleaner sticking out from the base, so I wanted to keep weaving each strand until there was only about 1/2 inch to 1 inch left to stick up.

I wove each strand around through the others, a few at a time, around and around.

Then I left some short points sticking up around the edges, and some I pulled underneath and stuck them through the middle. These little points will be the "stems" of my button "flowers."

The tips of each pipe cleaner stick up from the base to become little stems.

Next, I created my "tree trunk" by threading three pipe cleaners through the bottom. Each one was bent in half, so there were six strands coming up through the center—but not exactly in half, so that each strand was a slightly different length.

I used blue and purple pipe cleaners for my trunk.

I twisted those strands together and flared the tips out at the top. Then I took a couple of red pipe cleaners and twisted them around the top part, making loops to act as sort of abstract flowers, with the points of those sticking out as well.

My tree sculpture is done and ready for buttons!

Now you get to add the buttons! If your sculpture is about the same scale as mine, stick with small buttons, as larger ones will overwhelm the piece and probably cause it to fall.

Most buttons will have holes large enough to fit on the pipe cleaners.

The fun thing about stringing buttons onto pipe cleaners is that they will stay wherever you push them; you can push them just onto the tips like mine that are meant to act as flowers, or you can push several onto one pipe cleaner and they'll stay spaced out how you want them.

I put several buttons on the tree branches to act as leaves.

So that was my favorite of the sculptures I built; I made another tree-esque version but crazier with color.

For this one, I used all different colors, and I left my woven bottom loose like this.

I used more pipe cleaners for the trunk, leaving one end sticking out short and only one end of each going into the trunk.

Twist that trunk!

And again, single buttons on the bottom as flowers and multiples on the tree as leaves.

This one hurts a little to look at, but it was fun to make!

Then I made a nonrepresentational sculpture, twisting the pipe cleaners around my finger to make swirls...

This one is simple, but I think it looks cool and fun.

When stringing buttons onto the swirls, they can get a little unswirled, so after the buttons are all on, you can retwist them.

Abstract swirling buttony goodness!

And one last crazy one... This was actually my first try at the idea, to test it out. Some loops make up the base, with long strands sticking up.

Pipe-cleaner sculpting is so much fun!

As for the purpose of this project (beyond the joy of crafting), I plan to have my little sculptures on the desk in my studio and whenever I need a button for a project, there they are on display! I only used buttons for the sculptures that don't have any mates, all loners, so I can just grab one at a time as needed. And when I get new bags of buttons and I sort out the singles, I can add them to the blank spots, so the sculptures are forever changing!

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Comments (2)

nomadcraftsetc writes: Wow! How extreme! Love it! I think we are going to go and get a bunch of pipecleaners and have fun! Thanks for the photos!


Posted: 10:19 pm on March 29th

croqzine writes: How fun! Looks like a nice kind of therapeutic project... like you said, to bring out your inner-child-crafter. Maybe it would be a great antidote for if you had a creative block!
Posted: 11:00 am on March 28th

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