I had such a great visit to the Bay Area last week — it was so much fun. Besides Meredith‘s wedding, which was beautiful, I had a chance to meet up with Christina, Nancy, Natalie and Tricia to criss-cross the city on a beautiful summer afternoon looking for crafty treasures.

Natalie pulled up my blog on her iPhone, which was really fun to see! I love how cute the miniature version is…

First, we headed out to shop for vintage buttons. Instead of mentioning specifics, I’m going to quote Nancy here: “Since it seems to be an unspoken rule in the Bay Area crafty community, I cannot disclose the exact location of these wonders. But if you are really button-hungry, you can probably find it with a little internet search” (which is precisely what we did!).

I have such a soft spot for brightly colored plastic buttons, so that was most of my haul:

Then we all stopped by SF Etsy/Sampler headquarters, in a beautiful open warehouse space downtown. The windows are huge and gorgeous — they said they haven’t turned on the lights once since they moved in.

Lynn and Jennifer were hard at work on the upcoming Sampler:

And these bins are just about 40% of the cool handmade samples — not even half of the contents.

Have you heard about the Sampler reuse contest? Just do something cool and inventive with your Sampler box (there are plenty of inspiring pictures in a flickr set here), and send an email with photos to Team Sampler (details here) by September 8. The winner gets a free month of Sampler… hooray!

I still can’t believe that yet another visit to San Francisco has passed without me actually going to see Mission Dolores! I guess I’ll just need to plan another trip soon — maybe for Bazaar Bizarre?