Flowers and Buttons

I had a couple of days this past week where I was all caught up on orders for my Etsy shop and I had nothing to do. I was happy to have the time to work on new projects so I went to my huge button collection for inspiration.

I love buttons. I think it stems from my childhood. My mom would throw all of her extra buttons into a big canister. When she was trying to entertain her little kids while she worked on sewing projects, she would pull out her button collection and let us play with them. I loved looking for matching pairs and picking out my favorites. I still love finding unique buttons. I look for them in craft stores as well as thrift shops and antique stores.

So I pulled out my button collection and picked out a few buttons to make matching flowers. Here's what I came up with.

I am kind of new to making flowers, so some of them didn't turn out as well as I would have liked, but it was fun to just experiment a little. I usually never use patterns, but I did for these. Most of my patterns came from this book:

I love this book because it has patterns for tons of flowers as well as interesting braids and trims.

This is a project that I made with some of the flowers that I made that night. I have made tea sets before, but it was fun to do it in colors that were not pink.

I make my teapots hollow with a lid that buttons shut so that you can store all of the pieces of the tea set inside the tea pot.

This is the button that inspired the colors and flower for this tea set. I found this button at a cute little yarn shop in Carmel, California named Knitting By The Sea. Carmel is the cutest little town that I have ever been to. The entire town looks like it was taken directly from the pages of a storybook. I highly recommend visiting if you ever have the chance.

This is the flower that was inspired by the button. I tried to mimic the colors and the layered effect. I actually crochet this with embroidery floss because it offers so many color options.

Here is the complete tea set with the cups and cookies. I was really happy with how it turned out. I think that I will put it out at the People's Market this weekend. If it doesn't sell, I will list it in my Etsy shop. I can't wait to do more projects with my buttons and flowers, but for now, I have new orders that need to be filled!