On the drive home, we stopped for gas in Quartzsite, Arizona -- a bizarre little town where you can't see the town, only the business loop where evidently the owners of the shops and gas stations sleep under the counters -- and in a strange little Quonset-hut store, we bought a bunch of cool vintage buttons.
Some of them are here. A few seem to have been (rather ineptly) made into jewelry components at one point; many will suit very well for those vaguely-steampunk found object necklaces I've been doing lately.
The big hibiscus flower in the middle is a good example of why I try to avoid metallized plastic, but the wear and tear on the button has given it an awesome weird patina -- the orange is under the silver -- I'm tempted to do a tongue-in-cheek vintage-Aloha-shirt bracelet with it. It's quite large; for scale, that orange enamel waffle-weave button on the lower left is a bit bigger than a nickel. The one on the far right appears to be hemp fiber or burlap in a metal frame, which would be cool for a softer mixed-media piece.
The items focused on in the top photo are some little things purchased from the same weird, shivery shop: elderly bolts, it seems, which may have been buried or left in water. They have a nice pale, grainy bone look, which I expect will be awesome for a steampunk assemblage piece; I'm hoping I can ream the longer ones to restore the holes through the center, but the Phillip's-head still has a clear hole and is a sure bet for being awesome in ... something!
This also functioned as an experiment; that's the same place I'll be taking my shop photos from now on, though on the jersey knit rather than right on our little glass-topped table. The lighting is a touch cold, but warming photos isn't hard. We've actually discussed painting a water-colored Tiffany streak on the underside of the glass to go with our aqua pots and green and purple flowers, which could conceivably make a superb stage for style shots, but ... we'll see!
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