This mess (above) is what my button hoard started out as. I really didn’t think that I had THAT many buttons to be honest, LOL. My collection would be a dream for people working on their design degrees. So many colors and style, the list of possiblt uses is endless, I guess that’s why I never throw any of them away. Three years ago it was pretty much limited to what came as extras when I bought a new piece of clothing and a few that I had salvaged off of clothing that was too far gone to be donated. A “friend” (at the time) gave me a bag of tan and grey buttons and I hit a streak of REALLY good luck at thrift stores and garage sales. Then we went to the huge flea market in Elkhorn where I added a bunch more to the pile. We went to an antique store where I bought a giant glass jar of vintage and antique buttons for $8. Many of those were bone, real mother of pearl and glass. When they had the floods in Tennessee last year hubby had to go down there for two weeks and basically keep watch over a room full of servers with important info on them because the people who normally worked at that base were trying to clean up their homes and he had the right clearances and such to be trusted to do that. When they finally came back to work and were cleaning up their flooded office they were throwing most of it away. He noticed a box FULL of the big black peacoat buttons with the anchors on them. He remembered that I had bemoaned the extortionist prices they want for them on eBay and asked if he could have them since they were just throwing them away and the rest is history! So that added 50 more buttons to the list and even in recent months I’ve been able to pick up whole baggies of buttons (like 110 brass buttons for $1) for next to nothing. Even with several large scores, it just didn’t hit home until I decided to try to organize them and gathered them all in one place.

Boy oh BOY! What did I get myself into!?

Like most things that take me a week or more to do, it is something that I needed to do for my own good. I tried to organize them into baggies once, then into jars, then onto cardstock sheets, then individual cards. There were just too many and so many different ones that none of these options were working. It always ended up as a disaster that spanned several locations around the house. LOL. I was sitting here wondering what I could do that would make it easy for me to see them ALL without having to go through bags and cards, but wouldn’t take up a lot of space. I decided to keep them in a binder! I took card stock and began sewing my buttons to the pieces of paper by groupings (if they were the same) or individuals.) Once I had two cards finished, I used a whole punch on each and taped them together (back-to-back) around the outside edges of the sheets. This made the cards stronger and kept the threads holding the buttons on from getting caught on the buttons of the following page. Then, I just put the pages into a 2.5 inch 3-ring binder. I did have to keep a small box for baggies (about 5 or 6) that contain buttons that I have WAY too many of to sew to the large cards. For example I have 190 standard 2-hole white glass buttons, those are in the box (see below).

Now that everything is organized and sorted, that mess above now looks like THIS! (see below) Just a binder and a small box.

The pages inside the book are still a little on the chaotic side, but with 1,105 buttons that had to be sewn on to them, I was getting rather tired of the job early on. Below are photos of each sheet of that you can see all of my buttons. For a detail view, you can click the images to enlarge them.

All together I ended up with 1,666 (HA!) buttons that I am keeping. There are about 600 that I will be listing on Etsy in 4 lots and another 375 that I will be giving away in the near future. Below I’ve taken some close up shots of my favorite out of all of the keepers!

I love the peacoat buttons! The highly detailed antique black buttons are so cool!

I love the tiny buttons, especially the faceted green ones. The “pearl” buttons are actually hand blown glass and are hollow!

So many cool ones in this first photo! The crystal buttons came off the most gorgeous pink silk blouse. I have yet to make anything good enough to use these on! The hand cast pewter pirate buttons came from eBay. I ordered 28 of the skulls, and the artists threw in 10 of the ships as a bonus!

ANCHORS! These two might possibly be my favorite out of all of them! I love “uniform-ish” buttons.

these two big beauties came from a thrift store and only cost 80 cents for the pair! I bought these faux MOP rectangles at Joann’s last year. I just love them!

More Anchor buttons! More uniform-ish buttons!

I only have 4 of these bright matte finish buttons but I love them. More anchor buttons!

These handmade pewter buttons came from out trip to Williamsburg a couple of years ago. It was the only set they had left of the anchor design in the whole place! They were at the back of a basket on a bottom shelf in a little back nook area in one of the shops. LOL I’m so glad I never leave any stone unturned!