For the second year in a row I participated in the Half Scale Yahoo Group swap. Last year the theme was “treasures in the attic” and I made record albums. This year the voting was very close between “shabby chic” and “kitchens” and since I have several kitchens that need to be filled up, that was my preference. When shabby chic won I figured what the heck, nearly half the participants wanted kitchen stuff, so I’ll make some anyway!
Once again this year we had to make 46 swap items, so I needed to find something that I could easily do assembly-line style without losing my mind (and without costing too much). I found a nice blog about creating miniature canisters out of dowels, with a button + seed bead for the lid.
I went to Joanns Fabrics to get my supplies. Dowels were easy, but I couldn’t find appropriate buttons. I wanted to make two canisters per participant so needed almost 100 buttons of a uniform size, and they just weren’t available — the ones that came in bulk were either too big, too small, or all different sizes mixed together. I would have had to buy 25 of the 4-button cards at a few dollars each, which was cost prohibitive. Then I stumbled across these “cardigan buttons” that were the right diameter.
Turned upside down, the part that normally sews onto a sweater looks like a handle on a lid, which saved me the extra steps of having to fill in the button holes and glue on a seed bead. I’ve thrown out the packages now and can’t find the buttons online, no idea what the brand name is. They were $0.99 for a package of nine (according to the label) and oddly several of the packages had 10 buttons in them. And they were on sale for buy one, get one free — so I spent about $5 on 100 buttons.
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
