Cute as a Button

The idea for these original button-face dolls came to me in a dream. I was walking past the sale bin at a local fabric store when some big, sculptural, sassy German buttons in gorgeous colors started flirting with me. "Sorry, I'm in a committed relationship with a couple thousand other buttons already at my house," I thought. As I turned to go, the last words I heard as the store door closed behind me were a whispery "final clearance." I didn't look back. I woke up the next morning, though, haunted by a dream of those buttons with little polymer clay faces on them. I'd been completely hijacked. I went back to get a couple of the buttons to see if they'd stand up to firing the polymer, like I didn't already know it was fate. And then I went back and bought all the rest of those final clearance buttons, just in case everybody on the planet was going to want their very own button-face doll. I designed the prototype, and as I was working out the kinks in the pattern, the stories started coming into my head. Buttons and stories. Dreams and feathery boas. Beautiful fabric and satin slippers. Art, life, joy.