Thanks so much to everyone who came out to Powell’s on Friday night to hang out and talk buttons with me! I wrote it up over here, and so did Diane, Sarah, and Caitlin.

photo by Lee

A huge thank-you to my friends who helped so much with setting up, snapping photos, and keeping me going — in a dual stroke of bad luck and worse timing, Andrew is out of town and Pearl is sick, so it was a rough weekend for me to pull off a book event solo without my family there to cheer me on. But we had a lot of fun making a colorful flock of button hairclips and I’m very grateful to the folks who came out and buttoned with me!

And then on Sunday, Chelsea Cain wrote a lovely feature for the Oregonian about her family button collection, and how it connects her with her mother and now with her own daughter — something that is especially meaningful to me now that I have my own pearl button to share my treasures with. She was kind enough to invite me over to their house to make button crafts with them and wrote about her childhood, my book, and our afternoon “great button geek-out” of gluing, sorting, arranging, and rearranging.

It’s not online (yet?) so I snapped some quick photos of the page and put them here if you want to read along. Thank you, Chelsea!

And if you’re as eager for spring as I am, you might want to try this simple little pick-me-up project I just did for CraftStylish: making button and felt embellishments for a plain pair of shoes.