Winners! We have winners! and buttons!!

Thank you to everyone who came out to play in the Pincushion Design Contest (for the rest of us) 2015! We had some lovely entries which you can see on the page dedicated to them. Nice to see a couple of new faces here in the Kingdom. I hope you'll become regulars.

Don't forget to check over on Books and Quilts to see who Heather chose as her winner of the book from Book Depository. I really appreciate her generous offer of such a great prize, but I don't envy Heather the job of picking just one winner.

I, myself, have decided to take the easier route. I'm declaring EVERY ONE of you a winner! And for prizes, I'm sending out handmade buttons. I figure anyone who needs a pincushion will probably need a button or 2 at some time or another. If you submitted an entry, and I don't already have your address, please email me at covillewood [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll send your prize buttons right out in the mail.

Now, if you're sorry you didn't get around to making a pincushion, you can still get yourself some buttons. I've opened a little shop called Funny Business Buttons, and all the money (except for the little bit that Mr. Paypal takes for handling the transfer) goes straight to The Lyndhurst Feral Cat Project to pay for food and vet care for the cats.

Of course, I immediately slapped one of those turquoise cat buttons on my little baby sweater. What do you think? Fetching, n'est-ce pas? :)

There are still a few of these turquoise kitties left in the shop, 

as well as a few brown ones

... and bunnies and bees and bears and mice. Oh, my!

Grey Sweater, Blue Bunnies

It's done. I'm in love. Here it is.

Kate was right. The hair conditioner worked its magic, and the sock yarn that was a little bit scratchy is now lovely and soft. Baby soft.

And thanks to Monique (my polymer clay guru), there are now buttons. Monique is very patient and generously answers my newbie questions. She says next time, I can buff my buttons with an electric toothbrush. I can hardly wait to try that!

Size 6 to 9 months. Buttons are 5/8 inch in diameter.

Progress

The Little Birdies sweater is coming along. Here it is with one of the buttons.

 I LIKE it!!

And here you can see it still needs a couple of sleeves, but they'll have to wait a while 'cuz I'm workin' on something special for a little Saudi princess.

Need buttons

I inherited a pretty big stash of buttons. Sometimes, when I go looking, I'm delighted to find just the right button in there. This is most likely to happen if I only need a single. For the baby sweater, I need 4. Hmmmm. There are 4 buttons that are pretty much the right colour, but they're too big. Do I have to make the trip to town for 4 silly buttons, I wonder. Well, not when I have a whole boatload of polymer clay on hand! I spent a couple of hours mixing just the right colours (because you can do that with polymer clay). Then I made some bull's eye canes.

I left them to firm up overnight, and then put them in the fridge so they'd slice easily.

I sliced the canes into 3/8 in. slices, and pressed them lightly between 2 pieces of parchment paper with slight pressure from my thumb. This rounded the edges off nicely and made them very button-y.

You can see the 2 bamboo skewers (taped together) that I used to start the holes. They're easy to position when they're taped together. I ended up with 8 buttons that would be perfect for my sweater, and 3 that are slightly larger. Those will be for a future project, since I still have lots of the same willow green yarn.

I even got daring and rolled out a square-ish cane. That one produced some really interesting buttons that are about 5/8 inches in diameter.

I doubt I'll ever buy buttons again. Why would you when you have custom-made buttons at the end of the hall?

Some pretty things

Apple blossoms under a perfectly blue May sky

Flower cookies for a friend

A spring-inspired bracelet