Button cards and a fabric bowl

 

There's something immensely pleasing about a tin of buttons.  You can pick up a handful and let them slip through your fingers, enjoying the sound they make as they fall.  You can rummage through a mis-mash of shirt buttons, iridescent mother of pearl buttons and garishly coloured cheap plastic ones.  Large buttons salvaged from coats and jackets.  Novelty buttons from children's clothing, maybe from back in the day when babies wore delightfully named matinee jackets.  As a child I could quite happily spend ages threading buttons on to a length of knitting wool in order to make a necklace of sorts.  Why am I telling you this?  

Well, I had the urge to make button cards today, so I cut out tags and either stuck a pretty paper on one side of them or I added a printing stamp.  

These are three of them, and they'll probably end up added to a journal page or cover.  

I also spent a bit more time sewing lines of slightly wonky running stitch into what'll eventually be turned into a fabric bowl.  Oh, and I finished 'The White Queen' by Philippa Gregory too.  It was a fairly good read, being about the machinations of the royals and aristocrats in 1400s England, during the Wars of the Roses.  As always with novels set in this period, it's a challenge to keep track of all the characters as so many share the same first names.  With the men of the English aristocracy, there are endless ones called Edward, Henry, Thomas, George or Richard.  The book centres around Elizabeth Woodville, queen to King Edward IV, who gave birth to twelve children.  She lived until she was 55 years old, which was amazing given how risky childbirth was for women in those days, and how all those pregnancies must've taken their toll on her health.  

The next book I'm tackling is a world away from Tudor England.  It's 'Parable of the Sower' by Octavia E Butler.  It was first published in 1993, and the story's set in what was then the future, 2024.  The blurb on the back cover explains 'America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe.  Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal.  Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves.  Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.'  

If that doesn't hook you into opening a book and delving into the story, I don't know what would!