"Meet the Supplies" #2: Buttons

The second featured item in my "Meet the Supplies" series is Buttons!  I have always loved buttons, and in fact, perhaps some day I'll visit the Waterbury Button Museum in Connecticut and write a post about their collection, which I assume is quite impressive.

My own button collection is actually pretty modest compared with some of my other supplies, and it turns out as I discovered when I got them out to take photos, the collection desperately needed to get organized!

Basically just a sandwich bag packed full of random buttons.  Not remotely helpful when you need to find something specific!

I dumped all the buttons out on the table and started coming up with (hopefully sensible) ideas about organizational strategies. I knew I didn't want just a mass of resealable bags to dig through, so I decided to get creative. 

Similar buttons can be tied together with string, but this risks tangling, and can be super inconvenient if you're forced to always be tying and untying knots. 

Safety pins work perfectly and are very secure, but they aren't capable of holding that many buttons, and definitely not ones with a wide diameter. 

 

I remembered that I own a bunch of closeable hoops that are meant for use in jewelry making, and they can hold more buttons than the safety pins. 

I ended up combining the plastic baggie, tie-with-string, safety pin, earring thingy and little clear box methods to get my buttons into some decent semblance of order.

Massive number of purple buttons, which I must have bought or been given as a sampler pack, and "misc" mostly unique buttons, many of which have been found on the streets if New York. 

Flower shaped, clear, black, mother of pearl, and finally teeny tiny buttons for dolls' shirts.

Various shirt buttons always seem to find their way to me.

I spent a couple of hours at a fabulous store on Broadway carefully separating these clear and shell buttons from a miscellaneous collection piled in a massive container the size of an oil drum.  The clear ones especially continually prove useful!