#3

I went out in search of buttons yesterday. But I didn't end up at the Joann's superstore(though I've been to that place more than once or twice) or at our local and very cute Silk Road Fabrics . I made a beeline for this amazing junk store in my neighborhood. I've mentioned this place before. It's so jam packed with stuff and by that I mean anything you can imagine,valuable or otherwise. If you were to inadvertently run into a shelf it would probably be years before the owners discovered your skeletal remains beneath the piles of empty tins and scratched records.
I go there with one thing in mind, buttons. They have the most amazing vintage buttons. But, you got to work for them. You've got to search through countless tins crammed with buttons and you've got to do this searching while standing in the middle of an aisle and using a stack of junk as a table. My stack yesterday consisted of blankets and boxes and was topped off with a ventriloquist's dummy. The dummy's presence made balancing the tins I was searching through precarious, but there was absolutely no place to put the guy.


When I mentioned to the owner that I didn't need sets of the same buttons, she went to the back of the store and returned with these handmade bracelets that she'd found/bought. They were very crudely constructed with elastic forming the base of the bracelets and all manner of buttons sewn on to the elastic. In fact some buttons were attached to the elastic and then another, smaller button was sewn on top of that. Some were even triple deckers. She probably had 4 or 5 of these beauties and I bought them all.


I bagged the bracelets up along with a bowl(she did provide me with a silver bowl to sort my buttons into) of already selected buttons. My entire haul only set me back $20.


When I got home, I plopped myself into my knitting chair. It functions in other ways too, but for me it's my knitting chair. Anyway, I got myself situated and spent the next hour ripping the buttons out of the elastic. I knew I'd have to work for this treasure, but it was so worth it.