Every year around mid-August I get the itch to start hoarding fall stuff before anyone else is even thinking about pumpkins. If you’ve got a button jar that’s been sitting untouched since your last project, this is its moment. A button leaf garland is one of those crafts that looks like it took way more effort than it did, and unlike a lot of “fall decor,” it doesn’t scream dollar store clearance aisle.
The best part: no sewing machine, no fancy tools, and you can knock the whole thing out in an afternoon while half-watching something on TV.
What you’ll need
- Felt sheets in fall colors — rust, mustard, deep red, olive green (a multi-color felt sheet pack works great and saves you from buying single sheets one at a time)
- An assortment of buttons in browns, oranges, and warm neutrals — this is a great excuse to grab a bulk button assortment if your stash is looking thin
- Hot glue gun
- Fabric scissors or a leaf-shaped punch
- Twine or jute string, about six feet
- A hole punch or a sharp needle
Step 1: Cut your leaves
Freehand a simple leaf shape onto paper first — think oak or maple, nothing too fussy — and use it as a template. Trace it onto your felt with a fabric pen or just eyeball it with chalk. You want somewhere between fifteen and twenty leaves for a garland that’ll stretch across a mantel or doorway without looking sparse. Mix up the sizes a little. Uniform leaves look plasticky; slightly uneven ones look like an actual pile of leaves.
If cutting freehand makes you anxious, a leaf-shaped craft punch will save your sanity and your fingers. Worth the few dollars if you’re doing this every autumn.
Step 2: Attach the buttons
This is the step that turns a plain felt leaf into something worth hanging up. Glue one or two buttons near the base of each leaf, where the stem would be, layering a smaller button on top of a bigger one for texture. Don’t overthink placement — real leaves aren’t symmetrical either, and a little chaos actually sells the look.
A hot glue gun is faster, but if you want the buttons to survive years of storage in a bin, a needle and thread through the button holes will hold up better than glue that can go brittle over time. Your call — glue for speed, stitching for longevity.
Step 3: String them together
Once your leaves are dry, punch a small hole near the top of each one, or push a needle through if the felt’s thick enough to hold. Thread your twine through in whatever order looks good — I like clustering colors instead of alternating them evenly, since alternating ends up looking like a pattern instead of a garland.
Leave a few inches of twine bare at each end for hanging, and knot a leaf in place every so often so they don’t all slide into one clump in the middle.
Step 4: Hang it and adjust
Drape it along a mantel, a stair railing, or a window frame, and go back and fluff the leaves so they’re not all facing the same direction. This is the step people skip and it’s the one that makes the difference between “cute garland” and “garland someone clearly rushed.”
If you want a bit more variation, look up different leaf silhouettes — an oak leaf, a maple leaf, a simple almond shape — and mix three or four templates into the same garland. The Spruce Crafts felt project archive has a decent library of shape ideas if you want to branch beyond leaves entirely.
This one holds up well in storage too, since felt doesn’t crease the way paper garlands do. Toss it in a shoebox after the season and it’ll be ready to go again next August when you inevitably start planning fall crafts before Labor Day like the rest of us.
