karma baby!

Please excuse the sudden disappearance of yesterday's post, I took it down in an attempt to properly insert the paint picture, but it won't work! I'm working on it though, and it will be back soon.

So as you may have seen in previous posts, I signed up for the ornament swap organized by cake+pie and freshlyblended. This is my first venture into the whole internet/blog/craft exchange world, and I'm excited but sooo nervous. The women who write/design the craft blogs I read are ridiculously talented - I don't have them all on my links list, but to the left are three favorites, luckybeans, loobylu and soulemama. These three women live all over, Zambia, Australia, and Maine, respectively, and I love reading their posts, not just because they are crafty and talented but because they're amazing moms and they are so dedicated to their children yet they still manage to bring art and color to their lives, but not in that way that makes you say "yeah right Martha Stewart, and was the nanny watching the kids while you were sewing?" I strive to be like them when the time comes to produce the tan babies, ha ha ha. Oh and like Dooce. Mean people say that she's a "bad" mom, but I say she is a "badass" mom. Ha.

Ok tangeant. Blah. ANYWAYS, I signed up for the swap and have been stressing because I wanted to have a great ornament idea and not send something lame, like a wreath made out of popsicle sticks (which is great, if you're in grade school!) I looked on marthastewarliving.com and of course, my favorite idea was on cake+pie two days later, so I thought "ha ha nevermind, 150 people are going to do that now." I thought about knitting, sewing or cross-stitching, but given the fact that I'd have to make 8-10 ornaments I figured that would just make me crazy. I had to think up something that was intricate, but not too difficult to make. Something that I could make in a weekend or so, between studying for finals. Something that would reflect my personality, something fun and quirky. After a few preliminary designs, I came up with something really good - which of course, I'm not gonna reveal til later- something that needed a lot of white buttons.

I began to hunt for white buttons a few weeks ago. I went to the button bin at Windsor Button downtown and tediously picked through thousands to get to the white ones. I filled a box (it's $5 a box there, perfect for the student budget!) but after I looked at them at home I realized that they're just too small to make good ornaments. I needed buttons that were 1-1 1/2 inches across. If I bought 30 of them in a store it would cost me nearly $40 if not MORE. I was discouraged because as much as I'm all about the ornament swap, I don't want to put that much cashmoney into them. I then thought about what my father would do in this situation - he'd look on eBay.

EBay, of course, provided me with many solutions. There were people on there selling white buttons by the POUND. Then I saw the post - 40 large white buttons for sewing, 1 1/2" diameter. PERFECT! I was giddy. The auction didn't end for four days but I didn't care, I typed my bid in and bit my nails. Two days before the auction ended, someone created an ebay account for the sole purpose of outbidding me. Ok, biatch, I thought, you're new to this game, watch how it's done. I put in a max bid of twice the original bid, hoping the newbie would be discouraged when trying to outbid me in 5 cent increments and give up eventually. For two days, I was the high bidder again. And then - tragedy....I failed to notice that the auction ended 16:30 PST. PST!!! So yesterday, when 4:30 rolled around and my name was still on top, I declared victory. You can imagine my shock when I received two emails from eBay saying "you have been outbid" and "you have lost this auction." I went back to the item and noticed PST. Realizing that I had forever lost my opportunity at these perfect 40 white buttons, I went to another "buy it now" auction and bought 25 similar white buttons for a decent price, and hoped that I wouldn't get more than 8 people in the ornament swap, because otherwise, I wouldn't have enough buttons.

Today I received my ornament swap group. I scanned the list and noticed a great group of people, including women from Singapore and Ontario! How cool! Then I counted. Nine. Shit, nine people, and I have button for eight. What to do? I figured that maybe I could scrounge up three perfectly sized buttons. I was kind of bummed though because the lot of 40 would've been quite perfect, because my sister wanted to make some ornaments too. I figured that if the worst thing that happened to me all day though was being three buttons short, it'd be an ok day though.

Strangely enough as I sat down to write my daily post, I notice an eBay email in my inbox. It says "you have a second chance at item '40 white buttons' The seller is reselling them because the winning bidder didn't pay" NO WAY! Obviously, I couldn't let them go a second time around and snatched them, so now I'm the proud owner of 65 white buttons. I know to some people it's ridiculous, but after a morning at a lousy insurance hearing with a frigid lawyer, I really feel like I won something important. Go me :)

Stay tuned for ornament previews!

photo from ebay profile runnin1023, the seller of my buttons :)