Buttons, Sheep and Football

This past weekend was full of hockey and football and craziness.

I live in Steeler country, you see.  In Steeler country on a Steeler football day, if you aren’t wearing a black & gold football jersey, you are an outcast.

On a Steeler football day, like this past Saturday, if you need to go to the grocery store to purchase a gallon of milk, make sure you allow plenty of time because parking places are difficult to find and the checkout lines are impossibly long.  That’s because everyone is doing their junk food shopping right before the game.

The best time to go shopping is DURING the football game because the stores are empty.  You won’t miss the events of the game though because instead of music, the game is turned on loud so that everyone can hear what is happening.

This particular Saturday was worse than usual though.  That’s because the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Steelers, and Pitt Basketball were all playing the same day. 

Going into that grocery store was like going to the game.  It was a celebratory, exciting atmosphere, packed full of black & gold jersey clad fans buying their food to gorge on while watching a day full of sports.

I was a bit frazzled after leaving the store.

I don’t know how far away from Pittsburgh one has to go before getting out of Steeler country, but we live about 20 miles away and it’s pretty ridiculous.   This next week will be pure craziness everywhere and if the Steelers win and make it to the Super Bowl, it will only get worse.   

That is part of living in the Steeler nation though.  Simply put;  If you live here and don’t like football, then you shouldn’t live here.

So while we watched hockey and multiple playoff football games this weekend, I was able to get some stitching done.

My newest pattern, “Love For Ewes” is shown made with woolen wheels.

It looks quite nice with woolen wheels but I wanted to show how nice it looks using buttons for the wheels instead …

I have quite an extensive collection of buttons, so it was pretty easy to find sets of 8 buttons to use for this. 

You can see that I’ve stacked the buttons to create the wheels.

Just one large button would work nicely too, but I like the look of stacked buttons.  Different colors or even a larger sized bottom button would look just as nice so think outside the box with this.

Here’s a close up of the wheels.

and here’s a picture of the woolen wheels ….

You can see, both ways look really nice, it’s just up to you and your button collection to decide which way you want yours to look.

There used to be a time when women would snip all the buttons off of old clothing before they were discarded.  Most women back then had a collection of buttons.

Oh, the button collections I have found at estate sales!  Beautiful buttons of all sizes and shapes and colors.  I love them all so much that sometimes I find it difficult to actually use them on my finished things that I plan to sell.

How many times have I snipped buttons off of old clothes before I’ve discarded them?  Umm …. Zero!

Does anyone do that anymore??

Should I be saving the buttons from my old clothing so that my daughters may pass them down to the next generations to use?

hahaha … that just made me laugh.  My daughters would chuck those buttons into the trash so fast after I was gone and then make fun of me while they did it!

 

Happy Day everyone!