Buttons make everything cuter.

Alright.  So a little over a month ago, I designed this card:

Those button-looking things there at the bottom left of the card - those are actually images stamped onto cardstock, with liquid glass poured on them and hardened.  I usually loooove liquid glass - it really adds dimension to a card.  But I wanted to make 30 of these cards, and the thought of applying liquid glass to 90 of these stamped images, waiting for the liquid glass to dry, and cutting all of them out by hand made me think twice.

I was talking to my mom about this conundrum, and she made a fantastic suggestion - why not use green buttons instead?  She told me that, at a local craft/framing store called Porter's, there is this enormous metal bucket choc full of buttons.  Buttons of all shapes and sizes.  And you can fill up a little ziplock bag with these buttons for only $1.25. 

If you sew (and I don't, but I hang out with people who do), you know that buttons are extremely expensive.  Like, you can buy three buttons for $2.  Yikes.  And I wanted 90 buttons.  You do the math.  So I thought I'd pop on over to Porter's with kids in tow and check out the button bucket.

I didn't want to spend a million years matching each button to the exact color of green that I needed, so I just picked all of the green buttons I could find.  I kept Sadie and Micah happy by letting them fill up their own ziplock bag with buttons of their choice.  They wanted to choose really huge buttons and buttons that weren't normal circles.  That was their goal.  They had a blast picking through them and actually just digging their hands all around in there, honestly.  (When I was a kid, I used to love playing in the pinto beans bin at the grocery store.  I liked the feel of them spilling through my fingers.  I'm surprised my mom let me do that - it's not very sanitary!  Haha!)

I'd say I probably was able to stuff 150 buttons into my little ziplock bag.   Here is a smattering of samples that I brought home:

So then I picked out 90 that best matched the color of green on my card.  And it didn't matter to me that they were of varying sizes.  In my opinion, that's what makes them so cute.

After I attached the buttons to one card, I put it side-by-side to the sample card to compare and make sure I was making the right decision:

 Yeah.  I liked the buttons better.  So they stayed:

Ugh.  Now for the non-fun part - I reeeeally need to get my etsy up and running.  I get so overwhelmed by stuff like that.  And honestly, I wonder if there is even a market out there for homemade cards.  I kind of feel like the sending of cards is a bygone practice.  Only a few people still do it (and I am one of them).  Yet it would be fun to do something I like and make a teeny bit of money in the process, right?