Button Bonanza

Last week was busy for me, and I can't even much remember much of what I did. 

One thing, though, was this: I bought a jar of mother-of-pearl buttons from the online Goodwill site.

The whole jar, including shipping, came to around $30, but it's a small price to pay for how entertained it's kept me.

I still haven't gotten all of them separated, but I did quite a few. I'm storing them, by size and by color, in manila envelopes.

Encased in glass, they don't look like that many, but upended on my work bench, they make me think I'll be separating buttons for years!.

Here's a shot of them along with a button painting I made. (Though the buttons in the shoe are all MOP, they're ones I already had.)

A closer shot. See the dyed ones at the top? I'm loving those. There's a purple/brown, which may be the natural color of the shell, and pink and green and blue and red, and I even found a yellow one today.

A closer shot of the shoe. I stitched the buttons onto a piece of scrapbook-paper-covered cardboard.

More shots of the buttons. I'm also loving the carved ones. I found a wide variety of carved designs. (On the left side, upper third of the picture, you can see a couple of moon buttons. I've found three so far.)

Still more.

See the dyed carved ones in the middle? And the white carved on the right?

How about that lone little diamond button on the right. Isn't it gorgeous? And there's a square one on the left side that is darling. At the very bottom, you can see bits of the moon buttons. 

A closer shot of the diamond, along with some of the carved buttons. 

I'm also loving the MOP buckles. Making bags thriftily often means you don't have enough fabric for one long strap so I've been using buckles on them. These will work great! 

Too cute, right? 

Another thing I haven't shown here is the rag quilt tea cozy I made. I went thrift store shopping with a neighbor a week or so ago and found some small pieces of upholstery samples. From those, I made this:

I really like the look achieved by the rag quilt process. Who knows where it'll take me. I'm already planning others. (On that same trip, I picked up some scraps of teapot/teacup print fabric I think might work well with this technique.)

The back side of the tea cozy. (Aren't my name tags cute!)

Sunday's almost gone now, and a new week is starting. Hope you all have a terrifical one.