Why is this Blog Called “Button On It”?

Hi, I’m Sarah — and welcome to “Button On It.”

Every scrapbook page I create has a button. It’s not just a quirk; it’s my signature. If there’s no button, the page isn’t finished. Simple as that.

I’ve loved scrapbooking since I was a child when I collected newspaper and magazine clippings of the royal family and pasted them into old fashioned scrapbooks in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Proper old-school memory keeping!

I didn’t really scrapbook in my teens or when I got married and had children, but I always took loads of photos and kept every scrap of memorabilia — receipts, tickets, postcards, leaflets, the lot. These lived in photo albums, bursting with bits of paper that stuck out and got beautifully dog-eared over time.

It wasn’t until 2012/13 that I gave modern scrapbooking a go. I created loads of pages, mostly of my children when they were little, and there were buttons on them. I had loads in my stash, and they worked perfectly as embellishments. But after about a year, due to circumstances, I had to take a break.

Fast-forward to the 2020 lockdown (there’s only so much banana bread one woman can bake!), and I finally picked scrapbooking back up. And of course, out came the buttons again, but this time with purpose. My daughter had given me a lovely plaque that said: “Mums are like Buttons — they hold everything together.”

Purposely every layout got a button. It became my little creative ritual, the final flourish to say, “That’s done.” Sometimes the button is there as part of the design. Other times it’s tucked behind a photo corner or hiding under a cluster of embellishments. I do colour-match them carefully, so they can be tricky to spot, but now that you know, you’ll be looking for them!