More Dorset Buttons: Making Wagon Wheels When I'm on the Road

Dorset Button, wagon-wheel style, using hand-dyed silk thread and fiber-optic beads

What do you do when you're driving across 8 states? No loom, no room for a sewing machine or spinning wheel... so you take along small projects. This button, pictured above, kept my hands and heart happy from New York to Colorado, with three stops along the way.

Once we arrived in Canon City, where my daughter and her husband just bought a house, I finished it up with embroidery and beads -- emulating the yellow rabbitbrush plants that were growing all over the place. I call it my "Colorado Sunset Button," because the sunsets are really that colorful, in pink, mauve, and purple. It's a gift to my daughter's mother-in-law, Margie Stratton, who was so kind and gracious to us while we were there.

(Note to anyone who likes words: Why doesn't English have a word for the relationship between the two mothers-in-law? Like "co-mother-in-law" or "Sister Mom"?)

So then came more buttons, with a plan to make them into a bracelet, mixing colors of turquoise, purple, and orange. Colors of the Southwest again! Like this one:

And this one, the second one I made and my favorite, because I can't resist aqua:

And finally this one:

Next job: finish three more buttons and assemble them into a bracelet, hopefully with the help of my friend, beading teacher and artist Terry Byrne, at the wonderful store, Let's Bead. Looking forward to it! Even better, I have learned that I can survive for nearly three weeks without a loom ;o)