Let Me Tell You About My Crafty Business: The Button Babe Makes Pocket Mirrors, Bottle Openers, Pinback Buttons, Jewelry, and More

Did you know that I have a crafty biz on the side?

While my main freelance work is writing, copy editing, and proofreading (and I'm currently seeking a full-time job in Atlanta doing all of this), I also make and sell the following as The Button Babe:

• 1 inch pinback buttons
• 1 inch magnets
• Interchangeable jewelry with 1 inch magnet charms, including bracelets, necklaces, and rings
• Necklaces with 1 inch charms
• 2.25 inch buttons
• Pocket mirrors
• Bottle openers
• (And every single thing is fully customizable!)

I'd been a collector of cute 1 inch pins since my days as a 90s hipster/zinegirl, and when I won a little bit of money from a now-defunct search-and-win site, I invested in a professional grade one inch button press and had a great time making not only buttons but also magnets and jewelry. A few years later I invested in a second press that makes 2.25 inch buttons, mirrors (which I occasionally turn into hanging ornaments), bottle openers, and more.

I have an Etsy store at tiarabuttons.etsy.com and my own independent online shop at thebuttonbabe.com. I also sell my wares in Decatur, GA, at HomeGrown, and I hope to find some new brick and mortar venues in the near future.

I'm trying to expand my social media reach as well so if you are so inclined please follow me at:

• thebuttonbabe on Twitter
• thebuttonbabeshop on Instagram
• thebuttonbabe on Facebook

Spring cleaning and creating my new craft corner! - April 16, 2014

A few weeks ago I had lunch with my friend Denise, who is starting an organization and home-staging business. I brought her sheepishly into my house, which was, as always, a big crazy mess. She looked around and started pointing out things I already owned that could be repurposed. The lightbulbs started going off above my cartoon head. Then she came back and not only took me to Dollar Tree for some inexpensive organization solutions but also sat with me while I pawed through my desk of DOOM. That thing had drawers filled with such delights as many 3.5" floppies, an exploded battery, and pictures of a friend's baby - when said baby just turned 11. Then, happily, a neighbor was doing her own spring cleaning and gave me some things that were perfect to continue to corral my chaos.

This before picture is actually slightly after-before (because I never remember to take my before pictures - I've started saying "Take a Before Picture Today!" about everything. First, it gives you that picture. Second, it forces you to have a starting point for any new project.):

Believe it or not, I'd actually started cleaning up at this point...

Like...see that purple thing on the second shelf from the top? I'd corralled a bunch of toys - mine and the kid's - in there! Really!

That's my husband's laptop...and it was living on a chair he won as an award. The round table held various wedding-related memorabilia - but note that we've been married for ten years. There was a lot of dust on there.

So the first thing to do was to swap out the furniture. Denise noted that I owned a desk and a bookcase that both were wood (vs the white particleboard that you see) that would match the other furniture in the area. "But...move furniture? That's big and scary!" I said. I was wrong.

Bye bye table and chair. The books got neater too...

Empty!

Well...empty-ish.

The new bookcase emptied. (It was living upstairs in our office near...more books, as you can see.)

New bookcase in place! The bottom two shelves are for my cookbooks. The tippy top has my bridal bouquet, the centerpiece from my wedding shower, and the centerpiece from our wedding - finally people can SEE them!

I've had the desk since childhood. It was in our office acting as, well, my office, but it was hard to access and I always felt like I was intruding on my husband (who is a voiceover talent and who often needs to be recording in there).

Old night table (which had been forgotten in a corner, full of junk) now repurposed as part of the craft station. Inside is all my vinyl and then some foam stickers/embellishments and some notepads, all very organized, I promise, but also just...hidden and in their own spaces.

The fabric shoebox was 30 cents from Target. I decorated it with regular permanent vinyl, cut with my Silhouette.

Inside the desk drawers, everything is now corralled and organized.

 

Little containers section off this drawer to hold glue, scissors, hole punches, tape, that sort of thing.

Dollar Tree containers hold Silhouette supplies and extra things like staples and tape - all labeled!

A repurposed shower caddy from a friend's yard sale - now my postage and packing materials live on it!

Here, right now, is what my craft corner looks like! The wooden drawers on the far left were given to me by my aforementioned neighbor - I bought stain and will be changing it up over the next few days. If you look closely you can see a floating frame on it with a vinyl-cut image of my daughter.

Button-making machines and parts.

Button-making parts, mostly in repurposed food jars/Talenti containers, plus some apothecary jar-type-things. Everything, again, labeled! So nice to be able to find what I need when I need it!

Corralling the paper clutter with metal magazine holders, which were another gift from my neighbor. I put washi tape on each one for fun and then made quick little magnets to use as labels because this is a work in progress - I still need to sort through the paper in each one, but at least now it's organized. Next to those, my scrapbook paper and button-making scraps, plus my Reiki manual.

It is LOVELY to finally have a space that I can call my own with a place for everything and everything in a place. And I may have spent $20 total doing it - everything was either mine to begin with, given to me by someone, recycled, or bought at a place like Dollar Tree or Ikea. I'm still working on this too - still working on my paper clutter, still finding new ways to organize everything. Plus, this is just the start of a full-house cleaning/reorganizing spree!

(Not shown: My fabric scraps, which I use to make buttons/magnets/mirrors, are now all folded and organized and in their own plastic drawer instead of spilling out of random plastic bags. My various types of printer paper are now organized near my printer but not quite ready for their photo to be taken - next time! And my china cabinet now has a new display on its top that includes funky cookbooks and pictures of my daughter.)

That's a lot of pictures but I have more to show you over the next few weeks!

Random Roundup - August 3, 2011

• I won a two-week subscription to stock photo/image site Fotolia from Freebie Finding Mom. It entitles me to three downloads a day. Exciting! I haven't had time to activate it yet, but I'm hoping to use it next week. More images for my Etsy business, hooray!
• Speaking of Etsy, I've started really playing with fabric-covered (but still mylar-covered) pocket mirrors, bottle openers, and even one-inch buttons. A friend of mine gave me a bag of her quilting scraps and she has the CUTEST taste in fabric. Tikis! Cupcakes! Oranges! Kitties! My new circle cutter works well and I can see this all becoming very addictive. I actually can't decide between putting the stuff in my Etsy store and giving it to my offline vendors. 
• I would love to break off from Etsy, finally, and make buttonbabeboutique.com (which currently redirects to my shop) into a real, live store. I know a tiny bit of HTML (long ago I made marlatiara.com look all fancy, though I have no clue HOW anymore) but mostly I need some help. So if you want to trade web design for buttony things, let me know. 
• The kid has been back to preschool for two whole days. Last year, she went five days a week but only for four hours a day - attempts to extend that were made of fail for many reasons. This year, she's there 6.5 hours a day and so far, so good. That's the longest she's ever been away from both me and my husband, but her tantrums are more about how they don't let her eat crayons or she doesn't want to nap rather than about missing us. The teacher described one thing she was signing on the first day and we think it was "Daddy" and that she was saying that she wanted Daddy/was ready to go home now please. But I'm not sure. 
• She is on the cusp of walking, and I think school is going to push her to do it. She still can stand unassisted for seconds at a time, both with and without the SMOs. She can take a step or two. And she both loves using her walker - she seems to really be happy about the independence - and hates it, feels it's constraining. She also DESPISES the stroller now, so more often she uses her tricycle. It's interesting. I wish she'd still just go in the Ergo on my back.
• Pssst. I am fairly certain she has weaned. Four years of breastfeeding a child with cerebral palsy - not bad, if I do say so myself.
• I invented an awesome dessert. Take one 100-calorie pack of Trader Joe's chocolate chip cookies (they have actual ingredients AND they're delicious). Dump in bowl. Cover with lots of whipped cream (which honestly isn't that high in calories. mostly.). Sprinkle with TJs grinder of chocolate-sugar-coffee, which is my new obsession of deliciousness. Eat. Nom.
• I am currently reading the Wilder Life by Wendy McClure and I already sent her several tweets that were like "OMG I LOVE YOU SO MUCH" or something. The book really is that good though. The whole Laura Ingalls Wilder love? I get that. My beat-up many-times-read copies of the books are easily accessible, and I still re-read the Long Winter every so often. Also, I will put it here to avoid tweeting her again, but she remembers THAT Twilight Zone episode - the one I too remember about the boy who forges the psychic link with the girl who lived 100ish years ago. She notes the orange juice scene! I was THINKING about this episode in the first few pages of her book. Yeah, that's awesome.
• (I want to write a similar book about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - except that was really really fiction and there's not much to do but say "Um, so I went to Brooklyn and there were trees, but no junk shop and no school with women who spank kids.")
• I am also reading Forever by Maggie Stiefvater. I got to see her speak the other night at my favorite little bookstore. She's funny and charming. The book...is slow going for me. I keep putting it down. I keep peeking a few pages ahead. I am antsy. This is why I rarely read fiction though.
• America's Got Talent is not inspiring me to blog this season. I'm sorry. I really like some of the acts but I am not in love with everything like last time around. I am obsessively watching though, and sometimes I tweet at Howie Mandel because, you know, I'm a dork.
• And finally, I wish I was fancy enough to go to BlogHer. Maybe someday it will be in Atlanta. I did make buttons for Special Needs Bloggers. I wish I could be there to see them being worn on lapels and shirts and purses. 

Still Being Crafty: Freezer Paper Stenciled Onesies and Teacher Gifts - July 25, 2011

I don't entirely know how I found the time to do the following projects, but I did. School starts back up next week (yup, early, and yup, HOORAY) so I should have even more time for both crafting and actual money-making ventures (I'm a copyeditor/proofreader/writer and I'm always looking for more clients, plus I have my pinback button/jewelry/accessory business - online and off.) but for now, I squeak it in when I can.

So. First up is my next freezer-paper stencil project. I had so much fun making my daughter her T-shirts (which are too big for her right now, oops) and her new school bag that I kind of invented a reason to continue making things. A friend of mine is due soon with her second baby - her first boy - and I missed her shower, so I decided I'd make her a onesie set.

When I first started out, I figured I'd buy the basic white Gerber onesies - I even had all sorts of coupons and deals so they'd be very cheap. Yeah, they're cheap all right - they're great for when you need to just stick your baby in something before they poop/pee/yak all over it, but they're not so great for actually making into something crafty that will last. I didn't want to put a lot of work into a gift only to have it fall apart in the wash. So I went on a quest, and eventually I bought a four-pack of Carter's onesies at the Carter's store. These are thick and soft and when I combined a coupon, a sale, and a gift certificate (and a bunch of stuff for my own kid in the same purchase, including clearance pajamas for $2 and a clearance tutu for about $1.50, but I digress...), they were very reasonably priced.

And here's the final product (with credit to UselessCrafts.com for these particular designs):

Three freezer-paper-stenciled Carter's onesies. Awwww.

The squirrel onesie came out the best - in fact, I made a mistake with it and it wound up making it look even better:

Click on it to make it bigger and you'll see that the eye and mouth have the tiniest touch of color to them. Mistake! Error! Serendipity! But adorable.

I wish the purple guitar popped a bit better on the green onesie. I am debating adding a bit of highlight in white or gold to it or adding gold flecks all over...but I'm afraid if I mess with it I'll make it look weird. So for now it remains as is. In person it shows up better than in the picture, I promise. I'm super excited to give them to her, and I kind of want to make 100 more. In fact, I went and bought a few more paint colors AND some stuff that you can mix with acrylic paint to make that a washable fabric paint. I'm trying to figure out what to do next - probably I'll wait until I can find some thrift-store shirts/bags to paint.

And my other project was teacher gifts for the three people who went out of their way for my daughter this summer at the co-working/kid-watching space. It's called Bean, thus the bad pun on the label...

I got the basic label from the blog Nothing but Country (by way of Google) and then edited it in Photoshop. If you click through, you'll see that she threaded her ribbon through the label - which I love. I just couldn't quite manage that bit. Anyway, the mug is from Ikea (and it has an adorable firework/flower sort of pattern on it) and it's filled with a Starbucks gift card and lifesavers, har har har, pun pun pun. The cellophane bags were from Michaels (and I had coupons galore there, of course) and the ribbon is from the Target dollar spot (you don't get much at all, but it was enough for this project). I made three of these and I'm, again, super excited to deliver them to the recipients this week, our last week of summer vacation.

Happy crafting!


Link Parties:

I Can't Stop Stenciling! - July 16, 2011

OK, freezer paper stenciling is kind of addictive...

The color is truer in this picture.

The wing detail is better in this picture, but the wings really are a pink/purple swirl.

I want to say "Oh, this one took forever," but honestly the freezer paper stencil part took about 30-40 minutes (while watching House Hunters International, if you must know) and the painting took mere minutes. I swirled together purple and pink and it does sort of have a shaded/marbled effect if you look closely in person.

I haven't decided what, if anything, to put on the front of the shirt - any suggestions?

Next project is a baby gift for a friend. I read someone calling freezer paper stencils "the poor man's silkscreening" and I totally agree - I have always wanted to silkscreen (or buy a Yudu) and this scratches that itch (although I haven't been able to reuse a stencil yet - this one shredded as I peeled it off).

More Freezer-Paper Stenciling aka Wordless Wednesday - July 13, 2011

Finished Hand-Stenciled Tote Bag - July 6, 2011

I did it! I started AND finished a new craft project! And I am allowing myself to recognize that I may not make any more of these ever again but that I did complete this one thing and it's cute and I love it.

So. First I designed the stencils I wanted on my computer. Then I printed them out and taped them on top of freezer paper and traced both layers with a craft knife. Voila. Stencils.

Then I ironed them onto a blank tote bag like so:

Next, I carefully (ha) smushed fabric paint all over the stencils using a sponge brush:

And finally, I peeled off the stencils (realizing as I crumpled them up that I could've been more careful and saved them to reuse them, oops):

Voila! Adorable tote bag for my kid to carry her things (spare clothes, pull-ups, water bottle, snack, notes to and from her teacher) when she starts back up in preschool next month. Hooray!

This was so much fun. Next I want to get her some blank T-shirts and make some funky designs - guitars! skulls! skulls playing guitar! owls! HIPSTER THINGS and then some. Awesome.

(Happily, "Made By You Mondays" was on Wednesday this week, so I could catch it!)

Feeling the Need for Creativity - July 4, 2011

As I type this, rain is pouring down complete with thunder and lightning - so the manmade fireworks apparently are going to be postponed.

Things have been uneven lately. And when the going gets tough, I get crafty/creative/antsy. Here's what I've been working on and/or have planned:

• New obsession - cold-brewed coffee. I found out about it here first, and then I found this recipe and this article and this blog post with a lively discussion in the comments. It's so crazy easy that I wonder what took me so long to try it! I've already gone through the first batch and have a second in the fridge. I tried it hot, and it was fine (I'm still devoted to my Keurig), but iced coffee is AMAZING with it. 
• I've made the iced coffee with agave and with Torani syrup, but it also inspired me to make my own simple syrup. I only had Sucanat in the house, so the syrup came out brown rather than clear, and I probably should've used more of the Sucanat than I did, but it was an easy and fun experiment, now chilling in the fridge. 
• I acquired a bunch of fabric scraps - some a few months ago, some more recently - and am going to use them to make pinback buttons and pocket mirrors and bottle openers and so on. (I have one in my Etsy store right now.) But cutting circles by hand is a pain - so today I bought a fabric circle cutter (not the super-expensive one that I totally covet, but a less-expensive yet not-the-cheapest one that should work well with only one minor concern I have that I'll have to test first). 
• Because I wanted to do something to make the fabric easier to cut in this way, I also grabbed some freezer paper. I'll iron it to the back of the fabric to stabilize it. But that means I also looked up other craft ideas and now have plans to use it to create a stencil to decorate a blank tote bag for my kid to take to school. PLANS I tell you - I bought fabric paint and brushes and a new craft knife and a self-healing mat and I designed the lettering already and....big plans. I'll post pictures when it's done. 
• While buying craft supplies online may be cheaper, there's still nothing like going into a store, coupons in hand (of course) and walking out with new projects. 
• I still want to make Scrabble-tile necklaces (which I know everyone makes, and I already make necklaces, but...) but maybe I'll save that project for a few months from now. I have the tiles. I have the bails. I have the chains. I even have some art. I just don't have the glues and glazes.

Here's to a crafty July!

Bento and Smoothie of the Day (+ owl rings and gel cups) - August 18, 2010

Bento for the kid - August 18, 2010

Today's bento focused on things I know she'll eat, since yesterday's came back rather full after school. Strawberries and bananas, string cheese, Snapea Crisps, Annie's cheddar bunnies in the bento box. The food jar has black beans with olive oil and parmesan cheese. And a cereal bar.

Smoothie before - see all the green I snuck in?

Today's smoothie in the Vitamix - cow milk, semi-frozen half banana, fresh strawberries, frozen strawberries, frozen spinach, frozen pomegranate seeds, flax seeds, and a spoonful of Ovaltine. (I'm hoping when this container is finished that I can find a non-Nestle replacement.)

Smoooooth smoothie!

Again, yummy. And healthy!

I'm trying to lose a bit of baby weight (yeah, my baby is three, so?), and so these smoothies are all that I have for breakfast most mornings. I've also purchased Jillian Michaels' 30-Day Shred DVD as well as hand weights. I did the Shred once, and I really did enjoy the intense-yet-short workout (my free time is very limited, even with the kid in preschool, so short is good), but I also threw my knee out before I started and found it to be a bit too intense right now. So I've done one day out of 30 - that's how it works, right? One day a week for 30 weeks? Oh. Instead I'm occasionally doing Wii Fit aerobics (on the setting that I love, where I can watch TV/a movie while stepping) and thinking VERY hard about doing another day of the Shred. Really.

Meanwhile, I've been loving these non-gelatin gel cups from Trader Joe's:

A fabulous snack for this vegetarian.

I noticed them a few months ago in the store and grabbed them - there's also a peach-mango flavor - and became an instant fan. They're low calorie, they're delicious, but most of all they're vegetarian. I don't exactly miss gelatin (when I think about what's in gelatin, I definitely don't miss it), but I have some fond childhood memories of it, and it's nice to be able to indulge again.

And I made some rings last night - these will be for sale at a local boutique soon, but I think they'll show up in my etsy store too, if you're interested.

Everyone loves owls, hearts, and little birds!