One Shelf at a Time: Buttons

I love buttons. I love buttons stored in jars. I love looking at photos of scrap rooms with jars full of buttons and embellishments. I have tried to emulate these gorgeous scrap rooms by collecting a wide array of glass jars from spaghetti sauce to baby food. I am sad to say I have discovered that jars just don't work well for me.


 Right now, I have buttons stored using two different methods. Since I am on several creative teams, I need to know whose products I am using so I can properly credit the manufacturer. Method one: buttons of unknown origin are sorted by color and stored in jars. Method two: Buttons by manufacturer( then by color) are sorted into a tackle box style contraption. In examining both the way I purchase my buttons and the way I store them, I have realized that the tackle box is far more useful to me at this time. I will probably never buy enough buttons to fill up a single jar. I also hate having to dump them out, sort through them to find the right button, then return them to the jar.

I tend to buy my buttons in a bulk  from the daily deal sites. The last time I bought buttons this way was almost a year and a half ago. You get a lot of buttons when you purchase them like this and they tend to be from the same manufacturer. I was running low, so I recently made a bulk button purchase.

I used to store the buttons by product line. I decided I liked having them by color. So I decided to use my storage cases in the way I use colors. I scrap a lot of blue and green together. So keeping those buttons in the same container made sense. Pink and purple also went well together. Orange( I need more orange buttons!), red and yellow fit into another container. Which left me a container for neutrals and browns.

I now have one case filled with buttons  from one manufacturer, all sorted by color. It has sure made it easier to reach for a button when I am scrapbooking. I plan to ditch the jars in the future and switch my unknown buttons to a similar system.