One of the booths I always make a beeline for at CHA is Blumenthal Lansing . Apart from having such cool buttons, they always come up with really great but simple make and takes. Here's one I did at their booth this year. We started with a really unique bangle base - a piece of plastic tubing held together with duct tape! The base is then simply wrapped with specialty yarns. And the pièce de résistance: their gorgeous resin floral buttons! We used a collection from the new Flower Garden range which are securely wired on to the bangle and embellished with some seed beads. I love this little treasure and have already worn it several times and had many admiring comments! But what keeps the fibre in place? Well I'm glad you asked! Blumenthal Lansing teamed up with Glue Arts who kindly provided their wonderful Extreme Tac adhesive squares for this make and take. And when they say extreme, they really mean EXTREME. These adhesive squares were perfect for attaching the lengths of f......

Summer CHA is over and I'm back on deck again... well almost. So until I settle back into routine I thought I'll share a couple of cool make and takes I did at CHA. This first one is just so stunning and yet unbelievably simple: it's a way cool ring made using coordinated buttons from Blumenthal Lansing . These are from their new line called Coordinates and they come carded so all you need do is select your look and stack the buttons together. Add a few beads and your done. It's all tied together with plastic beading thread and then hot-glued onto a ring base. I think the hardest part of making this ring was selecting one of the fantastic button cards. Coordinates are not up on their website yet but if you're interested in this one, it's called Starburst. Look out for another make and take later in the week. Bye for now, If you can't get enough of My Tutorials and you want even more inspiration,  click here to find my books and printable pdfs...

Have you ever run your hands through a big box of buttons? It's a really lovely feeling having all those smooth buttons running over your fingers. For me it brings back memories of my childhood. You see, my Mum was a great sewer and she had an extensive collection of buttons that she kept in old biscuit tins. Most of them were rescued from garments which had seen better days and many of them still had the thread attached to the back of them. Sometimes there was even a little tuft of fabric attached as well which identified the garment it was from. It was a pleasant way to spend a half hour rummaging through the tins, sorting the buttons into their colours, shapes and sizes. Ah.... the simple things in life! Recently I had the chance to play with a large stash of buttons courtesy of the fine folks at Blumenthal Lansing . No stray bits of thread or fabric attached to these buttons but as I emptied them out onto my bead mat, I couldn't resist scooping them up and letting those smo......

I normally reserve glitter for Christmas crafting, feeling that the sparkly metallic colours were a bit out of place during the rest of the year. But after having the chance to work with some of the Art Institute Glitters recently my eyes saw glitter in a whole new light. You see, Art Institute Glitter comes in an enormous range of opaque and transparent colours too - glitters that sparkle but don't look out of place the rest of the year! Just recently I shared several wooden bangles that I had decorated with glitter and each one looks totally different to the next and I think that up until then I'd been stuck in the "glitter is only for Christmas" mode of thinking. But with an entire range of non-tinsel colours and effects to choose from I realised how very versatile it is - glitter belongs in our day to day world and the world should be just a little bit more sparkly! That's how Barbara Trombley sees it too. Barbara is the author of Glitter Artistry , a book ......