Tag Archives: buttons

Elephant Fabric Wallhanging

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I have one of those Victorian houses which is described as being a one and three quarters villa, which means that the upper storey has sloping coombed ceilings in places, cottage style, it’s just the way it was originally designed.

But it means that there are quite a few places where you can’t hang pictures on the wall, due to the angled slope, so I’ve made a virtue of the design by displaying fabric which I love so much that I can’t bear to cut it up for craft purposes or for making into something small like cushion covers. I just keep the material intact and back it with some thin wadding/batting and lining and sometimes sew around outlines in the design to accentuate it.

I also love elephants and have quite a collection of them made mainly from wood, china and soapstone too, so when I saw the fabric below I just had to buy it. I sandwiched the three layers of materials together to give it some weight but I didn’t fancy sewing around the many motifs, I decided to use buttons to embellish the designs and tie the layers together, so my button tin was raided and this is the result.

Another 1950s embroidery

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1950s cushion cover 1

I bought a job lot of 1950s embroidery projects from Ebay a while ago and this is the second one which I’ve tackled. The design is very traditional and old fashioned this time and none of the work had been started, it had obviously spent the last 60 years or so folded away in a drawer. When we move I’m hoping to get a house with a conservatory this time as I want a place for my cactus plants which will be safe for them. I’ve been keeping them in the greenhouse for years with no problems but the last two years I’ve had cactus fatalities when my aluminium greenhouse door froze up for weeks on end, so I couldn’t even rescue them. I digress – the cushions are for a conservatory which doesn’t exist as yet – except in my imagination.

As you can see from the first photo I should have done a lot (18 to be exact) of satin stitch circles but I thought the boredom of that might kill me. My solution was to rake through my mum’s old button tin and it came up trumps, as usual. Of course I’ve added buttons to the tin over the years but about half of them were mum’s. I found two sets of buttons of a similar rusty colour, I think they were originally on shirts which wore out. As luck would have it I had exactly nine of each set – perfect and they were very quickly sewn on. I think they look better than the satin stitching would have looked anyway. The flowers are going to be filled in yellow like buttercups and the others will be daisies. I’m hoping to get it finished soon because I have another Jacobean embroidery project which I’m chewing at the bit to start.

1950s cushion cover 2

The bottom left hand button looks strange but in reality it looks like the others, it must have been the flash or angle or something!

Buttons, marbles and beads

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I was inspired to write this post by Susan Beal at West Coast Crafty, a great blog.

buttons

When I was raking through my button tin the other week looking for buttons for my button bag, I was taken right back as usual to the many times that I’ve drizzled buttons through my fingers since childhood. I inherited my mum’s button tin and also some from my granny and mother-in-law. So quite a few of them are the very same ones that I played with as a wee girl. It’s a bit like walking down memory lane in the same way that a patchwork quilt can be as you remember the original garment which has been recycled. The big orange, flat buttons came off a really hideous candlewick dressing gown which my mum had in the 1960s. Both mum and dressing gown are long gone now.
I have two boys and they lost interest in buttons at a very early age, in fact I don’t recall them playing with them much at all.

They became far more engrossed with marbles – or jiggies as we call them. They grew out of them when they were aged about 10 or 11. When I asked Duncan why marbles were so much more interesting to boys he replied that boys are obviously going to like things that are ball shaped. Well, I’m saying nothing about that. I have custody of the marbles for the moment and as they are things of beauty I show them off in a glass topped jar. I think that things have to have a competitive element about them to hold boys interest for long.

It occurred to me that yet another of my collections is beads, which when you think about it are really a fab conglomeration of marbles and buttons. You can’t get much better than that. I wonder why I haven’t used beads much in my sewing? Watch this space.

Button Bag

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cropped-button-bagI hate waste so I try to use up all my scraps of material from any projects. I just had enough stuff left over from my Glasgow roses quilt to make this bag and my button tin had just what I needed for the decoration. Well, it all means less rubbish going into landfill sites – which can only be a good thing.