I love the look of mini-buttons on doll clothing. They’re super adorable and they come in all sorts of colours. My main problem? Even though they’re (somewhat) readily available in scrapbooking sections of stores, the pricing is at a few dollars for less than 20 buttons. If you go online, you’re paying a smaller price for a larger amount (lowest I’ve seen is $2.50 for 100 buttons) but you get all of the same colour. And while I can appreciate beauty of small plastic buttons, there needs to be some kind of alternative that doesn’t cost as much.

It’s been in style lately for human clothing to have large buttons – why not transfer that idea over to doll clothing? If you have buttons that came off of your own clothing, you can still use them! Make a nice peacoat for your dolls and use ‘large’ buttons on the jacket to mimic fashions for people!

Seedbeads are small and come in some fantastic colours! You can buy a lot for very little money – some places will even sell mixed packages or vials for a low cost. This can be great because the beads are an appropriate scale for dolly clothing, but at the fraction of the price of the plastic buttons. You can find them at dollar stores at $1 for a vial or a bag. You can also find them at craft stores. They come in various colours (solid colours, milky, translucent) and can be made out of plastic or glass.

Craft your own mini-buttons! Get some polymer clay and make them for yourself. Just a reminder that they will end up very thin so your best bet for curing the polymer clay is to boil them rather than to put them in a oven (they’re likely to burn). Quite possibly the more expensive of the three ideas, but polymer clay comes in great colours and you can make them the same size as the miniature buttons without completely breaking the bank. And when you’ve made enough buttons in the colour you have, you can use the clay to make something else entirely (maybe make your own doll-scale foods?).