Baby buttons, fat fingers and glue dots

You know, I make a LOT of cards.  Use yards and yards of ribbon and absolutely miles of ATG tape.

When you look at the cards I post here on my blog, you'll notice there's really not a plethora of small embellishments on them.  Oh, I have small embellishments to use.  Okie and I went to the scrapbook convention in Dallas last June and we bought quite a lot of them.  There are small gems and pearls of every different size and color.  We both also have containers of brads and metallic heat set embellishments to use.

Do you know why I don't use a lot of them? 

Today I was making some very cute cards using cheater paper.  Then I decided that the card really needed just a little "oomph" or some bling and started going through the embellishment drawer to see what would work.

Well, I found my packages of baby buttons.

To start off, they're in miniscule zip lock bags, which I find extremely difficult to pry open without slinging buttons all over the place. 

After I scooped them all back up into a pile, I started trying to isolate them by color so I could lay them onto the card to see how they looked.

The cards I make are A2 size and I'm pretty lax about using a bone folder to get a crisp fold in them.  So, the card was laying there, looking good and flat, until I sat the final button onto it.  At that point it decided that there was really a hidden spring inside rather than just being folded, and "sproing" I was chasing buttons all over again.

I take a deep calming breath, when what I wanted to do was wad the buttons back up in their teensy little bag and toss them over my shoulder, and lay them out again--after being sure my Martha Stewart bone folder had put a PERMANENT crease in the card.

The best way I've found to adhere plastic buttons onto paper is to use glue dots.  I reach for my roll and start trying to pick up the buttons, one by one, using my fingers, to place them onto the glue dots.  And, my fat fingers don't work too well.  So, I get my Tweezerbee tweezers because I know with the needle tips on them that I can pick up anything!

Plastic is very slick.  Tweezerbees are very tight.  Slick plastic will flip like a dolphin at Sea World all the way across your table.  Lesson learned.  I decide to just pick them up with my fingers and here we go again!

I managed to get the baby buttons pressed onto the glue dots while the dots were still attached to the paper they come on.  Now all I need to do is pick them off and put them onto the carefully spaced pencil dots I made for guidlines on my card.

When you mash a baby button onto a glue dot to be sure it's on there really good, it tends to make the glue dot not want to come off the release paper.  If you aren't careful, when you lift the button up by the edge, it will flip off the release paper AND WILL STICK TO ANYTHING THAT YOU DO NOT WANT IT TO STICK TO!   Another lesson learned.

I decided that if I'd just slide the edge of my thumbnail under the glue dot/button combo that I could then grasp it and place it onto the card that way.  Glue dots will stick quite well to your fingernails.  Well enough that you can't slide them off onto your project anywhere close to where you want them.

Have you ever seen a cat with a piece of masking tape on one of it's paws?  That's pretty much what I looked like trying to get the glue dot/button off my fingernail.  I'd get it off and it would be stuck to the other hand.  I'd get it off THAT finger and the majority of the glue dot would wind up stuck to my skin.

So, I'd put ANOTHER glue dot on the button and start all over.

Later this evening I'm going to post photos of the cards I made during the "Glue Dot Episode".  Right now, I feel the need to go "chill" for a while and I believe I hear a glass of wine calling my name!