My Latest: Button-Making and Badly-Written Bug Out Plans

a round-up of DIY 3D projects

a round-up of pumpkin recipes

an essay on poor decision-making in Godzilla

a tutorial for making your own custom buttons with sugru

I've been getting a little stressed around here lately--still so much to unpack, fall clothes to make for Will, somehow I've forgotten how to make dinner for my family every night, all my writing projects, kitting my etsy shop out for the big holiday season that I'd like to have, and, of course, lesson plans every week and a full day of schoolwork every day. Today alone I've got to make those lesson plans again for next week, unpack the homeschool closet that Matt emptied out into our bathroom so that he could build shelves for me, write a tute for CAGW, and the only thing that I actually *want* to do is make Will several pairs of flannel pants with reinforced knees.

So obviously, I'm about to go and do that first, and then just stress about the rest of it later.

The Most Ridiculously Cute Superhero at the Playground

The purple and pink superhero cape that I sewed as a birthday present for a little buddy of Sydney's was already tooth-achingly cute, but I had the feeling that it could be made even more nauseatingly cuter:

Buttons! I certainly wouldn't recommed this for the under-three set, but Syd's pal is turning a grand three years old, and so I glued each button down with clear epoxy glue, then stitched each one to the cape with achingly cute pink thread:

Syd, of course, couldn't permit her friend to receive an untested cape--what if it malfunctioned, somehow, and did NOT render superpowers? So we spent some time at the playground on the eve before the big ballerina party, so that Syd could make sure that the cape rendered its powers effectively:

 
 Yep, seems to work just fine.

Making Button Bobby Pins (with the Babies)

This is a project that I never would have made on my own.

My little girls, however, have a seemingly endless thirst for hair pretties. I have bought them any number of plain, serviceable hair bands and barrettes, loudly proclaiming each time that no, I will certainly NOT pay that much for the fancy hair pretties, seeing as how we can make them just as well ourselves.

The girls finally having noticed that, for all my talk, we have not yet actually made ourselves any fancy hair pretties...

Let the crafting of hair pretties begin.

I don't actually have
in front of me, but I remember these button bobby pins (and their simplicity), and if something can be made using hot glue, then that something can be made by me.

And the littles, who of course are permitted to wield the hot glue gun whenever they want, too: Unfortunately, I really didn't set up this activity well, and so although the girls seemed to enjoy themselves, and made button bobby pin after button bobby pin until we have to find the hiding places of more bobby pins in order to make more, I was frustrated by having to help them in the midst of my unwieldy set-up (me standing across the table from them the entire time, with the glue gun plugged in on Sydney's far side so that the cord was always in the way, and the button bins deep and full and hard to sift through), and I was too busy battling hot glue and button bins to actually get to make any of these pins, myself.

Next time, I'll sit between the girls, with the hot glue gun in front of us, and I'll set out some dishes for the more efficient and effective sorting of buttons. I've been planning a project for some time in which I encourage the girls to do the tedious sorting out of shank buttons for me, so ideally this will take place after that sorting, as well.

And yet, we do now have numerous ways for the babies to be all buttoned up now:
Which is success any way you look at it.

And At Least a Million Buttons

I sort of have a thing for the newspaper Classifieds. Maybe it's because it comes last, and so by the time I get there I've already slogged my way through world news and the political cartoon and the crackpot letters to the editor and all the awful things that happened the previous day to children or nice animals that the paper always seems to need to run. By the time I get to the Classifieds, too, I've been awake for at least twenty minutes, and I'm likely just about finishing my nice big mug of coffee that Matt always hands me on his way out the door (the man does not even drink coffee himself, but he makes a big cup for me every morning. He loves me, and he wants a sane caregiver for his children while he's away).

Really, though? It's because the Classifieds has weird stuff to buy. And do I want to buy it?

Oh, boy, I do. Currently, I'm coveting the $25 log cabin dollhouse kit, and the 30+ pounds of golf balls for $20 (no, I don't play golf). I've also seen a lathe advertised, and a workbench that I'm sure would have been just perfect in the basement workshop, and a bunny costume for a five-year-old, and enough prom and bridesmaid's dresses to have me sewing satin fancy-dress outfits for the girls until their own proms.

So every morning, coffee in hand, when I get to the Classifieds I call out to one girl or another, "Oooh, quick, run get Momma a marker!" And I know in my head that I'm acting, perhaps, the kind of crazy that the girls will write about so evocatively in their memoirs about how bizarre their childhoods were and how nuts their mom is, but I can't help myself, and the girls get just as stoked as I am as I try to describe to them, my TV commercial-deprived babies, exactly what a PowerWheel is and does and why they totally want one. And then I circle all the awesome ads. And then I call Matt at work and spend a couple of minutes attempting to make him, too, understand why we need a model train set-up, or fifty pounds of pea gravel, and I generally can get him to copy down a phone number or two, admitting that yes, he guesses we could perhaps use a trampoline, or 100+ sci-fi and fantasy mags from the 1980s, but he never, NEVER actually calls and purchases any of the awesome stuff that I totally wish he would.

Until yesterday, when Matt came home with a gallon of vintage buttons under his arm for me.

Here's what a gallon of vintage buttons looks like, if you're curious:
There are a lot of buttons that make up a gallon. And they're really cool ones, too. You know how sometimes you get someone's old button collection or see someone selling their old buttons at a garage sale, and all the buttons are brown or white and boring and just really lame? These aren't those buttons:

These buttons are all AWESOME! I do already own quite a number of vintage buttons from ebay, so many that I'm toying with the idea of separating out some that are awesome but that I probably won't use--the shank buttons, for instance--and re-selling them again, but I actually do incorporate a lot of buttons into my work. I'm still hugely fond of my button and upholstery remnant monograms, for instance, and I'm thinking of doing a set of numbers for my pumpkinbear etsy shop, as well, or perhaps an entire name in script (which I have seen done somewhere--Susan Beal, perhaps?).

And when I'm not using my buttons, I set them up on my shelf in the study and look at them with love when I'm thinking about something. Something like how awesome my husband is, for instance, for surprising me with a gallon of buttons.

Talk about knowing someone well enough to know what they'd like for a present.

In other news, I was THRILLED today to practice, for the very first time, a brand-new handicraft. No cheating if you're a Facebook friend or a regular blog friend and saw me going on about it earlier, but if you're not a Facebook friend (although you should be), can you guess?

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

In Which My Button Fancy Gets a Little Ridiculous

So you might remember that one of my ongoing projects is to incorporate some digital design into my product line--prints, perhaps, or digital collage elements, or even scrapbooking supplies. It seems like a better long-term crafting choice, since I can continue to get payback from the same piece of work over and over, along with the physical handicraft option of one payback for each piece of work that I craft.

Add to this the crazy amount of time that I've been spending lately rifling through my button collection, futzing around to make monograms and such (I'm also trying to reinvent the button ring--more on that later), and I've been thinking that likely the whole world would really pretty much enjoy digital access to all my beautiful physical buttons. I listened to this one episode of the some crafty podcast in which Maggie Taylor Carroll, who did this super-awesome digitally illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ( Other illustrated Wonderlands that I like are ) talked about how many elements of her work were made from actual stuff that she just threw on the scanner and scanned, and...
I'd title it "Button Porn," but when I titled a Crafting a Green World post Quilt Porn a few months ago, I got some weird traffic.

But see, that's not even porn-y enough for you, is it? I know that you're looking at the big scan, and you're thinking, "All those buttons make me so happy, but they're so small that I can't really see the detail in each button. Darn!"

Here you go, then:


So now instead of just futzily gluing and hand-sewing buttons to make each monogram, I can first futzily lay the buttons that I want to use out on the scanner and scan them, and then later I'll be able to futz around some more with the digital images of the buttons!

My summer is looking so fly, I tell you.

In other news, it's a rainy morning here. That means that instead of letting the girls run around outside for hours on end (they keep taking their pants off outside! What's UP with that?), we'll be spending a hoppin' few hours on...
You guessed it. Dinosaur Bingo.

Controlled Chaos (Except for the Controlled Part)

This is what the work table in my studio looks like right about now:I count three different types of craft projects in the making there. I'm hoping to finish up one complete set of button alphabets tomorrow, which I'll likely sell by the letter. I'd like to do another complete alphabet to sell as a set, but it might be nice if at my first couple of craft fairs this season I had something to sell OTHER than two sets of button alphabets, ya know?

Ooh, and a third set just for the babies, but since we have nowhere to put that one it gets to be low priority for now.

I am so stoked for craft fair season.

And garage sale season.

It would be nice to see the sun again, too...

P.S. Check out my post about appraising your vintage stuff before you craft with it over at Crafting a Green World.

What To Do With Four Pounds of Buttons

Did I ever mention that just a few days after winning my super-awesome vintage button auction on ebay, that I won another 2 pounds of vintage buttons with a low-ball minimum bid? I don't know why one auction went so high and the other so low, but there you go...

Four pounds of buttons.

And they become: A button alphabet! I'm so totally stoked by them that it makes me kind of giddy--a perfect de-stresser from a stressful week.

It took me a while to figure out a method, and it's still some convoluted pattern of designing the alphabet in Photoshop, printing it, cutting it out, slicing it down the middle, tracing it onto the paper bag, then gluing each button on, then SEWING it on, because what's the point of a button if you're not going to sew it?

I'd like to eventually make two entire alphabets of these--one to sell individually, and one to sell as a set--and I still haven't figured out what to mount them on or how (fabric? Quilted? Felt? Mat board? Cardboard?), but hopefully by Luna Fest I'll have a first-generation in stock.

Oh, and one for my baby, because for some reason she's going to be three years old next month:
If anyone knows what committee I should contact to protest this whole "time flying" business, I'd appreciate their email address.

Buttons, Buttons, I've Got the Buttons!

So my Matt spent practically the entire day slaving over the computer--he formatted my laptop, reinstalled Windows, reinstalled all my software programs, futzed over drivers that wouldn't install correctly, futzed some more--rendering my computer and himself virtually useless in all other regards all day, during a month in which I have online grades to record, book proposals to write, blogs to post in, an etsy shop to update, research to do, and finally, FINALLY everything is reinstalled and I'm back in the game.

And if the internet is acting wonky again (which was the ORIGINAL PROBLEM, remember?), well, for now I'm inclined just to overlook it and be grateful for what I have.

In other, CRAFTY news for a change, I've been reading and re-reading , and whining to everyone I see all about how in all the other crafty blogs I read, everyone in those blogs is just swimming in vintage buttons, and I have like five buttons, total, that I ripped off of an old Gap shirt (from Goodwill, of course, not The Gap, not that you care) of Matt's before transitioning it into a dishrag.

I couldn't stand it anymore. In a shocking move and a nail-bitingly tense auction, I bought over two pounds of buttons on ebay: This auction actually went a little higher than most of the vintage button auctions tend to do, because of two reasons:

1) The seller, who clearly had no idea of the awesomeness of what she was selling, just sort of mentioned in passing that most of these used to be her grandmother's buttons (DING! DING! DING! DING!)

2) In the sort-of blurry photo of a bunch of the buttons spilled out of the Ziploc bag onto a table, you could see studded all over the pile beauties like these: And now they're mine, ALL MINE!!!

Come on, even if you're not one of my crafty friends, you gotta love a shot like this one:P.S. Check out my shout-outs on Craftzine and Recycled Crafts! Remember, only make plant markers out of vinyl miniblinds that were made after 1996, or you and your loved ones will all die of lead poisoning.