The ring pillow revised...and yet more buttons

This spring has been so lovely, all the blossoms are out on the trees and flowers everywhere. We went for a walk on Saturday and headed down to Queen West (through Queen's park where there was some kind of big pot festival?). First stop was Mokuba to find a ribbon for the ring pillow. See - I listen to you guys - and thank you everyone for the comments and suggestions.

In case you don't know, Mokuba is a large ribbon store with rows and rows of ribbons. It's clean and tidy and new, very white and spacious and a bit on the expensive side. But they have a wonderful selection and I knew I would find what I was looking for.

A page from Martha Stewart Weddings was the inspiration for the colours of our wedding. I love the brown ribbon in the picture. It's a grosgrain ribbon with tiny white stitching down the centre. So while looking for a ribbon for the ring pillow I thought it would be nice to bring in the brown, and preferably find this exact style of ribbon. Of course Mokuba had it, they even had the dark brown, but it seemed a bit too dark and almost eggplanty so we ended up choosing a lighter brown version. Here's a detail of the revised pillow:
I say revised, because for some reason in that posh ribbon store, the pillow suddenly started to seem a bit lame, not stuffed enough and the hanky seemed a bit saggy and the yarn was just an embarrassment. So I added some more stuffing and snugged up the hanky by gathering it more in the back. And then, believe it or not, I ironed the whole thing while assembled.
It's still not perfect, but I do think it looks better. The back especially is a little bit awkward looking, but acceptable mainly because it is the back.
So, I wasn't sure if I should bore you with the ring pillow yet again first, or another reference to Martha Stewart, or perhaps yet another button picture. I've decided to end with the buttons. Because I know what you're thinking, "what is with needle book and buttons?" Well in this case I'm not just showing them off, they do come with a recommendation - at least to local readers - because they're all from a store on Queen West called MacFab (www.macdonaldfaber.com) so you could get some like these too.

I went into MacFab for the first time to see what they have, expecting to find fancy designer fabrics as featured occasionally on Cityline (incidentally I looked up their site and found this pretty pillow sewing project). But in fact they had lots of sewing extras including stacks and stacks of boxes with buttons attached to the front so you can see what's in them. I don't think most people take 15 minutes to spend $3.22 on buttons, but that's what I did, and these are the lovely buttons I chose:While we were on Queen West we also exchanged one of Bradley's skeins of yarn from two years ago at Romni (you can exchange yarn even years later as long as you have the receipt) and he bought me a lovely skein of white 100% angora. I'm making a lace scarf from it which I will show you in my next post - along with the link to the free pattern.