Button Creations!

Well, I got my creative pants on this weekend and made some fun goodness. (In case you're wondering, yes, I tend to talk about pants in person. Especially after teaching 2nd grade, when I would routinely tell my students they had on their smarty pants (a good thing), their funny pants, their dancey pants, or their grumpy pants, amongst others.)

This weekend, I played with buttons! As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I was inspired by this entry on SouleMama and decided to give my hand at button goodness a try. So on Sunday, as Josh was playing chaperon at a Sixers game with the kids from the neighborhood Boy Scout troop, I got a bit crafty and creative.

I started out with the earrings. First, I gathered my buttons, the earring backs, and my hot glue gun (all available at any craft store). Now, my button collection is nothing like my mom's, and sorting it was nothing like sorting hers. I still have fond, fond memories of sorting through her hundreds of buttons, by color, shape, size... I loved it. My current goal coming out of these projects is to build my button collection so as to increase my choices. I felt rather limited, I must admit. But it didn't stop the fun from happening! In the end, I just made two pairs as I only wanted to make things I knew I would wear. It may be hard to tell from the picture, but the silver ones definitely have that hint of vintage (I'm planning to wear them to work today) and the white ones will be a fun outdoor spring/summer pair.

Now, onto the magnets. We have actually been in need of some magnets lately. While our magnet poetry words are overflowing, our supply of magnets that can actually hold things is suffering. The inspiration for this project was well-timed. I picked up some heavy-duty magnets from the craft store (hey, I wanted magnets that would hold things up -- there's no backing down now), and I was going to stick with just buttons. But then these cute little wooden cutouts caught my eye. They were adorable. And cheap. I caved. In the end, I made six magnets, only two of them from buttons. But come on, can you resist the cuteness of my little frog and turtle friends?? I didn't think so. I would like to make more button magnets, but as I said before, I need to grow my collection a little bit first.

Now, obviously, none of this was very difficult. Probably the "hardest" part was breaking off the loops on the backs of the more decorative buttons I used for the magnets. (If there's a way to do this that I'm completely ignorant about, please let me know. I am anything but an expert on these things.) Yet, even though none of this was complicated in any way, shape, or form, and even though it didn't really require that much thought or planning, I can't tell you how much GOOD this did for my soul.... as evidenced by the fact that I just wrote a huge blog about it and that for the past two days I've been making Josh look at all of it over and over again. It's just the fact that I'm creating again. And little and unimpressive as it may be, it is a very, very good thing for me right now.