This Sunday, I’ll be doing a free crafty demo and signing copies of Button It Up at the Crafty Wonderland Super Colossal Holiday Sale here in Portland!

Please come by between 1 and 2:30 pm on Sunday to make a set of Button Hairclips with me.

I’ll have everything you need to make a pretty pair of hairclips to bring home: buttons, rhinestones, beads, and blank pins to fancy up.

You can also snap up a signed copy of Button It Up if you like!

There are four crafty demos on Sunday, here are all the details:

11:00am-12:30pm Personalized Fortune Cookies
with Kristen Rask of Schmancy and author of Plush You!

1:00pm-2:30pm Button It Up Hairclips
with Susan Beal of West Coast Crafty and author of Button It Up and Bead Simple

3:00pm-4:30pm Vintage-Themed Glass Tile Ornaments
with Maria Raleigh of Collage

5:00pm-6:30pm Embroidered Holiday Cards
with Diane Gilleland of CraftyPod and author of Kanzashi In Bloom

And there will be more than 200 vendors selling all things handmade for the holidays!

Hope to see you…

Crafty Wonderland Super Colossal Sale
Sunday, December 13th
at The Oregon Convention Center, Hall D
(777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Portland, OR)
from 11am-7pm
FREE + All Ages

I mentioned in my last post that one of my lovely Bead + Button Jewelry students, Marty, brought in her antique family buttons to show us, along with some gorgeous vintage Bakelite pieces she’s found more recently. She was kind enough to let me snap photos of her beautiful collection, including the magical button tin that holds it all!

These tiny shell buttons and the larger carved ones were passed down from her grandmother.

Look at these adorable teeny-tiny doll buttons, too!

These two pairs of earrings on the right are made with some other treasured family buttons — the tiny jewels are hand-set one by one in these settings. Beautiful!

And she has been collecting lots of beautiful Bakelite buttons to add to the heirlooms, too.

She mentioned that she’s found lots of her favorites through Jocelyn, who also sells buttons at The Needle and at Oregon State Button Society shows.

I can attest that Jocelyn has marvelous buttons! Here are some of my favorites from her booth at the show I went to in April.

A few other bits and pieces to mention…

-A good-sized chunk of Button It Up is now up on Google Book Search if you’d like a peek at some of the housewares and embellishment projects! Please give it a good rating if you like it, that would be great.

-Urban Craft Uprising was fantastic! I’ll have pictures of the fabulous Button Mania workshop Kristen Rask and I co-taught to share soon (my laptop is full to the brim and I need to start moving old photos somewhere else before I can even retrieve what’s on my camera)… but in the meantime, check out her new book, Button + Stitch, which is available for pre-order on Amazon!

The button hairclip video is already up from this morning’s episode of AM Northwest — just click “crafting with buttons” on their front page and you can check it out if you’d like. Wow, that was fast! They showed off a few of my book projects and then I made three hairclips — a solo blue one, a Blazers-inspired black-and-red layered one, and a spring-y pink sparkle and green one (a similar style to these three, which were some of my samples from last week at Powell’s).

photo by Lee

One thing that might be helpful from this little video, which isn’t mentioned in the book, is that it’s easier to keep your hairclips balanced and even while the glue is drying if you slide them onto a postcard or envelope or something else to hold them in place — otherwise they can tip to one side and the button can slide around a bit. I figured that one out at Powell’s last week when people were making hairclips and needed to take them home before the glue was completely dry, it works nicely for these guys.

And I’m super excited that Craftster is doing a button-themed craft challenge this month, with a copy of Button It Up as the prize!

This challenge calls for you to decorate an existing item in any room of your home with buttons.

You can use buttons from your stash, purchase new or vintage buttons, or even craft your own buttons! Glue, sew, resin, or use any method you want to attach the buttons. Your object could be something as small as a soap dish in your bathroom or even as big as a piece of furniture in your living room. Just choose an object and make sure the end result is adorned with buttons.

You can find all the details on this thread, and you’ll need to post your entries between April 1 and April 5 to enter. I can’t wait to see the projects…

A huge thank-you to Leah Kramer (who made the lovely Buttons and Beads necklace, which you can see more of on the project extras page and pictured on page 57 in the book) and Craftster for including the book as part of their fantastic contest. Good luck!

I had such a great time at Bolt on Saturday afternoon! Thank you so much to everyone who came by to hang out and talk buttons, make magnets, and eat lavender shortbread cookies.

This one is blurry but happy — it was so nice to get to talk about buttons with people who love them too.

Thanks to Chelsea’s wonderful article about her family button collection, some folks brought their own canisters and jars of treasured buttons to show us…

…it was lovely to see them all.

A huge thank-you to Lee for taking these photos of the heirloom buttons, that was an incredible gift.

This amber color was so fresh and gorgeous — like it was brand-new instead of decades old.

This one was so exquisite in person, the details and faceting were spectacular.

Just lovely.

So, thank you so much to Gina, Amy and Julia for having me, to Lee for the spectacular pictures, to Andrew for wrangling our little pearl button so we could all hang out in the shop together, and of course to everyone who came by, it was such a treat to spend the afternoon with so many button enthusiasts!

Two more bits of button-project news:

My CraftStylish post this week is how to throw a button party, with how-tos for making button cookies and cupcake toppers. I loved making these and maybe you can use some of the ideas for a crafty party of your own!

And I will be on the AM Northwest show tomorrow, Tuesday 3/31 (on KATU 2 here in Portland from 9-10 am), showing how to make button hairclips from my book, and talking about the upcoming Handmade Nation premiere. You can see it live tomorrow morning (I think about 9:20, though that could change) and then the video will be on their website by Wednesday. So if you couldn’t make it to Powell’s and you’d like to make some hairclips, now is your chance!

Hope to see you at Bolt on Saturday afternoon! I just made a sample batch of magnets,

and a sample batch of button shortbread cookies,

and I’m really looking forward to the party! Please come say hi if you can make it over.

Button It Up at Bolt!
4:00 this Saturday, March 28th
Bolt Fabric Boutique, 2136 NE Alberta St in Portland, 503-287-BOLT

ps: I’ll have the how-to for these button cookies plus some bonus cupcake toppers posted on CraftStylish on Sunday, if you aren’t in Portland and want to throw your own button party!

On Sunday, Chelsea Cain wrote a lovely feature for the Oregonian about her family button collection, and how it connects her with her mother and now with her own daughter — something that is especially meaningful to me now that I have my own pearl button to share my treasures with.

She was kind enough to invite me over to their house to make button crafts with them and wrote about her childhood memories, my book, and our afternoon “great button geek-out” of gluing, sorting, arranging, and rearranging. It’s not online (yet?) so I snapped some quick photos of the page and put them here if you want to read along. Thank you, Chelsea!

And if you’re as eager for spring as I am, you might want to try this simple little pick-me-up project I just did for CraftStylish: making button and felt embellishments for a plain pair of shoes.

Thanks so much to everyone who came to Powell’s Friday night! It was so much fun to see all the cool clips people made (not to mention getting to hear about the fantastical poker-chip buttons Ryan is planning for his upcoming trip to Vegas).

I read from the book and chatted about a few of my go-to shops and sources, and people shared some of their favorites too…

I also brought some of the projects from the book, and it was so nice to see them all out on the table together!

Then everyone got down to business: button hairclip-making. There were some really gorgeous ones in the mix, I loved seeing what people made!

A special thank-you to my awesome friends Caitlin, Sarah, and Diane, who helped me with every bit of the night, from setting things up to snapping pictures of it all. You can also check out some very nice posts from Diane and Sarah about the evening if you like! Last night was a bit of a blur to me (I have a sick little baby here at home, and it’s been a long week) so it was really nice to hear about it today from a not-me perspective, to tell you the truth.

And of course a huge thanks to Powell’s for hosting our Button It Up craft night! In case you couldn’t make it by and would like to pick up a signed book, they have them ready to go.

Thanks to Lee, Caitlin, and Sarah for sharing their photos with me — the first four are Lee’s, the fifth one is Caitlin’s, and the last three are Sarah’s.

Hope to see you at Bolt!

I made some button hairpins in the style of the Shiny Set (page 136) for samples to show at my Powell’s event this Friday night… here they are in progress with the glue drying. Hopefully I’ll have an action shot of them accessorizing something pretty soon!

There are a few more pictures from our little Sunday button craftathon in the Button It Up flickr pool. And Caitlin made these two hairclips (with a bonus magnet for good measure) — so pretty!

(photo by Caitlin)

I also just did this covered button bracelet and ring set for Button It Up month over at CraftStylish. It’s such an easy and fun little project, and super-customizable if you mix up the fabrics! I used a favorite Denyse Schmidt print, but I think alternating all different patterns or colors could look fantastic.

I’ve been putting together my little button bags for the Bolt book event this morning! It’s been fun sorting through trays of buttons and picking a mix of all different colors and sizes to put together.

Each person who buys a book at the shop will get to choose a tiny goody bag of buttons to get them started with a project. No two are alike — I don’t think I’ve seen any overlaps at all!

And each bag has one of my little button moo cards tucked inside, too. I like how they turned out…

I’ll post more about the party when it gets closer, but the details on my two Portland events are all right here. I can’t believe the first one is next week!

I also have some exciting contributor news to pass on: Cathy Callahan, who designed the Covered Button Necklace, will be on the Martha Stewart Show tomorrow (March 11), making these beautiful ribbon-straw flowers! Congratulations, Cathy! I can’t wait to see it.

And I’m happy that one of my Bead Simple contributors (and crafty buddies), Kathy Cano Murillo, has a new book out: The Crafty Chica’s Guide to Artful Sewing! She embellished this sewing machine with buttons and trinkets and sparkles for the book — so Kathy. I wrote a review for CraftStylish today and they’re doing a giveaway over there, so leave a comment on the post by March 17 for your chance to win!

I made a few versions of a button link necklace for CraftStylish this week… row of reds (using a few vintage buttons I especially liked), black and white handmade (using the shrink art buttons I made in last week’s tutorial) and the blue circles and blossoms version from Button It Up. This is a personal favorite of mine: easy to make, easy to wear (if you don’t have an eager baby reaching for it every five seconds), and super-customizable. And I love making spin-off projects, too; I think it’s really fun to see how using different materials or colors changes an idea up so quickly.

The complete tutorial is here and you can check out an archive of all the button-themed projects so far for March — there are some gorgeous ones up for grabs over there! It has been really inspiring to see all these fantastic button crafts.

And in book-related news, I wanted to mention that the two signed copies of Button It Up I posted to benefit the Roy family in Texas sold the first day (thank you!!) and I’ve added a few more to my Etsy shop, in case you want one. (These new copies aren’t part of the fundraiser, but the kits in my shop are, and I’m hoping to do more for it soon, too.) I’ve also been ordering supplies and sorting buttons for my upcoming book events (the first one is Friday, March 20 at Powell’s, and the second one is Saturday, March 28 at Bolt Fabric Boutique), and I’m getting excited for those. Hope some Portland folks can make it out to them!

And Heather of Dollar Store Crafts wrote a nice review and is hosting a giveaway on her lovely blog, starting today! You can enter via comments or on twitter. Thank you, Heather!

I’m going to post about some favorite button shops and sources this week, so please stay tuned if you’re looking for some new treasures…