Two Birthdays

We are celebrating my youngest daughter's 11th birthday today! We have some fun things planned, including having an early dinner at Olive Garden and then going to "The Great Jack-o-Lantern Blaze" at Van Cortlandt Manor this evening. Hopefully the rain will stop before then...

Meanwhile, I have another good friend at work who shares this birthday (I think I know about 5 people total who all have birthdays on October 1st. Guess what fell nine months earlier - New Year's Eve!). I made her these cute button earrings. She's a real bead and jewelry buff. I thought the range of purples and grays in these would compliment her wardrobe. Also, the fact that they're made with buttons and not beads just might make them a unique item in her jewelry box. Fun!

All Buttoned Up!

I finished another charm bracelet, above, with a darker green, tree theme, and then cleaned up my worktable. On Friday evening, I decided to focus only on polymer clay and got out a few stamps and some Pearl-X powder. I came up with the charms, below, which I'll use for future projects.
Then something made me think about using buttons in jewelry and the variety of ways they might be used (I'm not sure what inspired me this time - there are no button charms in that book!). I got out my tub of buttons and started playing around. Here are some of the things I came up with:
Fun! I'm looking forward to incorporating them into some jewelry soon. While I was at it, I made a few other cool charms that didn't use buttons. Here they are below.
And then I got the idea for these bracelets. I had gotten some large jump rings last year, thinking I could use them to hold my sketchbook together, but it turned out they were too small. I wasn't using them much, but they work great linking together these buttons! There are all kinds of possibilities with these too - options for color, size, combinations of the two, even dangling charms off the links! I wasn't the first person to come up with this - you can find them on ETSY, but I sure like the way they turned out! Only thing is, as you can imagine with the beads, fabric, buttons, wire, tools, and other elements I needed for these charms, my work table is all messy again!