Whew. Today things have been a little crazy but I’m here, to announce the giveaway winners. The winner of the scraps is Kimberly, who wants to use them to make a quilt for her mother. The softies book goes to Emily (check out her art quilts!), who wants to make softies for her son. Yay! Thanks for playing.

Now, I wanted to share with you a great find I made this weekend. Paul suggested we go on a drive, so I got in the car with just my wallet and the next thing I knew we were in Butte, Montana (home of one of the largest Superfund sites, the Berkely Pit). It was really deserted looking downtown, but beautiful in that gritty, toxic-pit-in-the-distance way. I took lots of photos, here are some of my favorites:

We walked into one really nasty junk shop –it was all JUNK, if not trash–and walked by some other pretty antique stores that were closed. But then we came upon Antiques on Broadway, and Paul found the sewing section for me. There were little baggies of buttons and old machines, all reasonably priced and in good condition. I was deciding what to get when I noticed some notion jars. Behind them were cookie tins. I beckoned Paul to help me lift them down, and as I suspected, they were chock full of buttons!! I only bought one (I have some self control), and I spent the rest of the night cleaning the buttons. First I had to cut off the threads and disintegrating backing fabric on about half of them, because I think someone had cut them right off of their clothing. Then I oxycleaned the whole bunch. A lot of them were pearl and some kind of heavy shell, and they looked much better after the wash. Here are the ones that made me really excited, along with a cute textured doily I also purchased.

In addition to that, there were all of these:

And there were also random things, including: a bullet, a tax token, a very old safety pin, a second commandment charm, upholstery tacks, etc.  Butte is probably the kind of town where this stuff is still in people’s houses, and if it was up to me, I’d drive back every weekend to get some more of it!