Button Love

I am a collector.

Actually,  let me correct that.  I am a hoarder.

I hoard fabric, zippers, shoes, food (remind me to show you my pantries some day), books, jewellery...Let me sum it up by saying that if a certain class of objects gives me pleasure, you can be sure that I will buy a wide assortment.

This holds true with buttons as well.  I love buttons.  I love the shapes, the colours and the simple (but powerful) utilitarian nature of buttons.  

My earliest and fondest memory of buttons is probably one that is not unique to me.  My maternal grandmother had a tin, full of buttons.  There were dozens of buttons that had been removed from discarded articles of clothing.  She often gave me this tin to play with - dumping out buttons, putting in buttons, organizing buttons into little piles, feeling the smoothness of some and the roughness of others.  I loved that button tin (and the late grandmother that is so intimately associated with that memory).  To this day the sound of buttons rattling around in a old tin evokes such strong emotion in me.

So, I hoard buttons.

I store all my buttons in small plastic bags.  Each plastic bag holds a different set of buttons.  I so enjoy going through these buttons to find just the perfect match for a new garment that is hot off the machines.  It stirs up fond memories every time I open the button drawer in my sewing room.

The Wall of Fiber

So, after the whole 2am mouse incident, my bedroom has been thouroughly cleaned and vacuumed. The living room looked like a tornado hit it with all of the clutter, but the bedroom was clean. The business invested in a set of wire mesh cubes to store all the sweaters that had previously been sitting on the floor in bags. It took an entire evening of 3 adults, a good wrench, a rubber hammer, and about a bazillion zip ties, but the large empty wall of my bedroom now looks like this:
Then all 12 gigantic bags of sweaters were neatly folded, sorted by fiber content and yarn weight and placed in the cubes. 12 bags only took up half of the space...
So, we added some bubble pack envelopes, the waiting to be sold yarn, and the entirety of my personal yarn stash. Y'all, that is a lot of fiber on that wall. It is glorious!
As a note on the personal stash, the upper right hand cube is all of the store bought wool yarn I own. 1 cube is full of spinning fiber. The bottom 2 right hand cubes are acrylic. The rest is all recycled yarn that I have kept for myself. Now if I could only find some time to knit...

As another note, I have been trying to blog about this for 2 days, but blogger didn't want to upload my pictures. Stupid blogger.