Uses For Random Buttons

It's the rare day that I have to buy buttons. My mother came from a family that followed the tradition of saving the old buttons from your clothes when the clothes were worn out and went in the ragbag. She got further infusions of buttons when older people she knew passed their button collections on to her. She has button boxes, I have button boxes...there are a lot of buttons around.

Of course the small problem with saving buttons is that sooner or later you wind up with a lot of buttons where you only have one or two of a kind. Hate to throw them out, but what do you do with them?

Some of my mother's random mother-of-pearl buttons have gone onto ornamental pillows, which it seems a lot of people have done. 

Some of them end up in other crafts - I have a hair clip my sister made years ago that has the same kind of overlapping look as this picture frame.

Knitting projects that take only a couple buttons, like slippers or hats, are another notion, and a good one if what you have is larger, ornamental buttons - the kind that used to come off coats. I've done that a few times.

But I learned of another, apparently trendy, use a few weeks ago, which is the reason I've been picking through my collection for lone buttons in specific colours today. Brides are making (or buying) button bouquets! One of the knitters I know has requested buttons for her wedding bouquet, and I had to go search online to see what she was talking about. 

Kind of a neat idea, (and appropriate for someone crafty)! Buttons either stacked or wired into flower shapes, or sewn in a dome shape, and set up as a bouquet. What'll they think of next?

Who's Got The Button?

Finished the pair of sweaters for a classmate's twins, but I wasn't really happy with the button selection I had here, so I decided to have a hunt through my mother's button boxes when I went down.

Of course, there was other stuff going on - Christmas baking, and homework, and laundry, and I had to meet Pumpkin, the new cat. Doesn't he look rather like Puss In Boots in Shrek2? He's a smart one - the only one of the cats that has found and used the dog-door in the mudroom - and has a taste for bread. He goes out with Dad in the morning and shares the chickens' bread cubes they get as a treat.

But by Sunday morning I got down to the hunt. And a hunt it is. You see, half the fun (and half the problem) is that Mom has a number of button-boxes.

And very few of them are in any way organized.

You can find buttons of all sizes, shapes, and colours, and you will frequently find a match for a button from box A in box C.

I have volunteered to organize the boxes over Christmas, so that at least all the buttons of a given type will be in one box. It makes life so much easier. The way it is now, after sorting through 6 or 8 boxes for possibilities, you have a result that looks like this:

At that point, you can start the elimination process by removing anything you didn't find enough of, and then proceed from there. Which is what I did - cut the field down to a handful of candidates, and then discussed options, with the happy result that the sweaters are now buttoned and cute and ready to present to the recipient.