Strawberry Jewelry

Spring slowly starts, yesterday I found the first bloming flowers and I can feel my spirits rising. To me some of the best things in the fresh and new garden year are strawberries. I eat them fresh from the field, purred over ice-cream, as a topping on a cake, in any way really.
BUT alas, strawberry season is still a couple of weeks away. So to sweeten the time until then I thought I'll just make myself some strawberry jewelry. The making is quite simple, once you know how, but you need to have a lot of red buttons.
It took me a while to find a good way to make the strawberries tight and also a get a good hook, I spare you the trials and show you what I ended up doing. I made some earrings and a necklace, while making those, I had an idea how to make a ring as well.
If you don't make a hook you could easily use the strawberries as decoration for a fancy dinner table, or you could work them into a spring wreath for your front door. You can come up with loads of variations probably. If you do please take photos and share them in the comments. I would love to see what you come up with.

Step 1: This Is What You Need

- a lot of red buttons
- green aluminum wire 1/16 inch thick, per strawberry you need a string of about 4 inches long.
- jewelry pliers
- chain
- chain fastener
- ear creoles
- some green leather
- a template for the strawberry"crown"
- scissors

Step 2:

You start the strawberry by folding the string of green wire in half. Then you stack the buttons. Start with the smallest and gradually use bigger buttons. The top button should be smaller again, maybe even the top two. Check if it looks strawberry like. Put the green leather crown on top. You should have two wires sticking straight out of the strawberry. For the hook you stick a mini wooden clothes pin and a skewer between the sticking out wires. The skewer is on top. Now you can fold the one of the wires down using the skewer as a tool to make a round loop (you could also use jewelry pliers which I didn't have). You should have one looped and one straight wire. Now you twist the straight wire around the looped one. Pull tight. Then you hold the strawberry under the tab, let the leather get wet. Press it down onto the button. Let dry. Finished.
Repeat until you have as many strawberries as you need for your project.

Step 3:

Make some strawberrycrowns out of green leather. Outline the template onto the leather and cut them out. Use a small holepunch and make two little holes into the crown.

Step 4:

Quick little ring how to:
Find something that is the size of your ring. A highlighter did the job. Cut a string of red aluminum wire about 8 inches. Fold it in half. The strawberryring stacks the same way, only here you create the ring where in the other strawberries you created the hook. Bend the wires apart, twist around the "highlighter or whatever you use. Finally twist the endings of the wire around the base of the ring.
Done.

Step 5: