No-sew Julip rosettes

[astudyinscarlet]

Here are the many (a great many) rosettes I've been making recently mostly for my Julip and similar-sized models. I had a lot of ribbon offcuts I wanted to use up for mini rosettes but I hate sewing and a lot of the ribbon was too poor quality anyway to sew into tiny rosettes so I thought about how I could make them without sewing and came up with using buttons. I bought various mixed lots of buttons and this is the result:




I'm not sure what I'm actually going to do with several hundred tiny rosettes now but since they look particularly effective all together I'm probably going to make up some rosette wall displays with some of them.

To make rosettes like this you will need:

ribbon offcuts (around 1cm wide is good for the larger buttons, narrower would be best for smaller buttons)
assorted buttons (ideally flat or nearly flat, with centre holes)
glue 
rosette centres (for these I've used various things - metallic confetti/no-hole sequins, centre-hole sequins, circles punched from decorative paper or card, tiny stick-on plastic jewels)
optional: glittery fabric or card to add additional layers behind buttons

Some tips:

you can usually buy bundles of ribbon offcuts and small quantities of decorative paper/card as well as mixed lots of buttons fairly cheaply on ebay or in places that sell craft (especially scrapbooking) supplies

Hole punches/paper punches are great for making rosette centres

Glittery or pearlescent buttons usually look the most effective with satin ribbon

Fancy gift tags, wrapping paper, greetings cards, covers off old notebooks, packaging card inside sets of fancy bubblebath and the like are often a good source of metallic or other decorative paper/card for making the rosette centres from. You could also use fancy paper/thin card to make the tails from if you have no ribbon, they just won't be as durable.

Tacky glue (the thick PVA glue) is good for sticking the rosette tails together. I use gel superglue though for sticking the tails onto the back of the button (but always be really careful with superglue) as it's much quicker to dry but I'm sure tacky/PVA glue would work fine for that too and be much safer.

You could also print out small numbers or use small number stickers if you wanted to put the actual placing numbers on the rosettes, or just write them on with a fine-nib marker

Pinking shears are good for cutting out circles from glitter or similar fabric/card to either use behind the buttons to create an additional layer or instead of the buttons. 

You can layer buttons together if you have different sized buttons and to make multi-colour rosettes

[magpiecat]

They’re great 👍🏻 thank you for sharing how to make them 😃

[samantha]

These look fabulous what a great idea! Thanks for sharing.

[Hiawatha]

Wow these are so cool! What a great idea.

[happyhoof]

These are great. But I love the fact that you made loads and loads of tiny rosettes and then thought about what you would do with them afterwards

[eldabee]

These are awesome! I'm going to have a go at some stage

[whitestones]

What a great idea! They are wonderful.

[juliporiginals]

These are fabulous what a great idea, they look so effective

[elli]

These are so cute and I love how different they all are! Really creative

[lydia]

Wow I love those!

[astudyinscarlet]

I've finally finished putting all these on display boards. Some will probably go in my barn whenever I finish that. I may try selling some of them though. The boards are mostly upcycled cardboard, covered in either thin cork sheet, offcuts of dolls house carpet or decorative paper and edged with thin wooden strips (I think they're sold as coffee stirrers or something like that). (There were a few more rosettes left over which I've just stuck onto offcuts of wide ribbon to hang up, maybe in my tack room or barn)