The Crafty Buttons

We are Joel and Amber Button as you probably gathered from the above photo! ! Joel and I are a hubby/wifey team and we created Crafty Button Designs in September of 2012. I do the creative aspects of the business such as designing, color choices, Photoshop work etc. Joel is the technical one and so he handles our website, and all of the technical/web aspects of the business. Although, he is making an effort to learn Adobe Illustrator since I’m partial to Photoshop.  Joel and I have been married for over 8 years, together for 10 and have 3 beautiful, rambunctious little ones. Kal-El is 6, Jade is 4 and Willow is 3, and our Corgi, Yoda is 9. They keep us busy for sure. I became disabled sue to a chronic illness in 2011 and was looking for a way to work from my couch. I tried physical art for a while. I sold bottle cap, domino and scrabble tile jewelry, mixed media paintings and such at festivals but it was too physically demanding. Then I realized that the demand is not for physical art but for the graphic designs artists purchase to make their physical and digital projects and so, Crafty Button Designs was born!

For inspiration, I use pretty much anything, anyone and everything. I’ve always loved the Jack London quote “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” So when I’m feeling particularly un-inspired I will do random Google searches or look at online art galleries but mostly I will read something or watch something and get ideas which I keep in my sticky notes app on my Galaxy phone. My children also heavily inspire me. My son was big into pirates for a while so I created a line of vintage pirate designs. The same happened when my daughters had me reading Grimm’s fairytales every night.  So I definitely go after it with a club!

What most people don’t know about our business is that my hubby and I are both going back to school. Life and family got in the way of traditional state school 10 years ago so we found an online school especially geared toward the entertainment industry. He is going for a bachelor’s in Mobile App development and I am going for double bachelors in graphic design and creative writing for entertainment. So who knows, maybe one day you will purchase an app made by Joel or watch a movie I edited graphics on!

So other than school, the business and the kids, it’s hard to find time for anything else. My hubby enjoys playing video games and cards with the kids and I still sometimes create mixed media art for the house. You’ll see some of the stuff I made in the example photos I’ve provided for this newsletter. Together, we enjoy playing Mario games, watching TV shows on Netflix, cooking and camping when I’m able. We also love to read but everything we do involves technology, we love it!

So as you can tell, we are a full-fledged family based operation! You can find our shop on Etsy and we are guest designers on the Scrapbooking/Digital Arts community One Story Down for January and February and hopefully longer. We are also active on Pinterest, Twitter, this blog and will have a business facebook account soon. So please like us, follow us, tweet us, pin us, etc ! You can find links to these on the Find Us tab of this blog. Thank you for visiting us here at Crafty Button Designs.