Waste not, want not. This crafty guide perfect for anyone looking to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Nowadays, many of us “outsource” basic tasks. Food is instant, ready-made, and processed with unhealthy additives. Dry cleaners press shirts, delivery guys bring pizza, gardeners tend flowers, and, yes, tailors sew on those pesky buttons. But life can be much simpler, sweeter, and richer–and a lot more fun, too! As your grandmother might say, now is not the time to be careless with your money, and it actually pays to learn how to do things yourself! Practical and empowering, How to Sew a Button collects the treasured wisdom of nanas, bubbies, and grandmas from all across the country–as well as modern-day experts–and shares more than one hundred step-by-step essential tips for cooking, cleaning, gardening, and entertaining, including how to • polish your image by shining your own shoes • grow your own vegetables (and stash your bounty for the winter) • sweeten your day by making your own jam • use baking soda and vinegar to clean your house without toxic chemicals • feel beautiful by perfecting your posture • roll your own piecrust and find a slice of heaven • fold a fitted sheet to crisp perfection • waltz without stepping on any toes Complete with helpful illustrations and brimming with nostalgic charm, How to Sew a Button provides calm and comfort in uncertain times. By doing things yourself, with care and attention, you and your loved ones will feel the pleasing rewards of a job well done.

This is a book about a button. It is also a book about noticing, wondering, and imagining. Mostly it's a book about you... the button you will find... and what might happen next. | IN A BUTTON opens a wondrous space of curiosity and joy as readers are invited on a quiet, beautifully illustrated journey to ... notice, wonder, imagine, create, delight, and be with a single button. | Debut author and illustrator team, Melissa A. Butler and Nicholas Hohman, have created a book not only about a button, but also about the awe and wisdom of wonder itself. | The artwork holds weight and energy that feels like a button itself, and slowly, with each page turn, you begin to hold your own expansiveness like a button in your hand. | IN A BUTTON has a light narrative structure that opens with a child who makes a discovery, builds to involve readers in making their own imaginative discoveries, and returns to the quiet, creative self-sufficiency of the child. Inside this story is a uniquely nuanced concept book. The illustrations shift in perspective, balance, and scale as they move between exacting realism and impressionistic brush work to mirror the fluidity of how a wandering mind notices size, shape, color, texture, and orientation alongside and overlapping with introspection, invention, memory, and dream. | This is a book to read again and again... a book for families, educators, librarians, artists, meditators, and makers... a book of play, invention, and discovery... a book to remember that a button is enough as it is, and you are enough as you are. | "Beautifully paced, with engaging illustrations." "An engaging, charming and soothing introduction to contemplation." "By book's end we find that a button is not just a button in the same way our story is not just a story, but a starting point for fostering curiosity and imagination."

Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed, used, rejected, and refashioned throughout history. Focusing on the period between 1880 and 1925, when “technologies of the hand” proliferated (including typewriters, telegraphs, and fingerprinting), Plotnick describes the ways that button pushing became a means for digital command, which promised effortless, discreet, and fool-proof control. Emphasizing the doubly digital nature of button pushing—as an act of the finger and a binary activity (on/off, up/down)—Plotnick suggests that the tenets of precomputational digital command anticipate contemporary ideas of computer users. Plotnick discusses the uses of early push buttons to call servants, and the growing tensions between those who work with their hands and those who command with their fingers; automation as “automagic,” enabling command at a distance; instant gratification, and the victory of light over darkness; and early twentieth-century imaginings of a future push-button culture. Push buttons, Plotnick tells us, have demonstrated remarkable staying power, despite efforts to cast button pushers as lazy, privileged, and even dangerous.

This sweet tale of an older sister struggling to understand

Title and statement of responsibility taken from cover.

Yellow Bird has a button. It does . . . nothing! It is a good for nothing button. Red Bird and Blue Bird are excited to try the button. But when they press it, they discover that the button makes them happy. Happy is something! A flabbergasted Yellow Bird insists the button does nothing. But it sure does seem to be making him mad. Mad is something! The hilarious debate that follows takes readers on an emotional roller coaster that pokes at the power of imaginative play.

Fiction /Sci-Fi After thousands of years of atomic warfare, the Antons on planet Ergo had mutated so badly that they were no longer recognizable as human. They escape to planet Duos in Galaxy 3 and establish a new civilization. However, they want to restore their bodies, so they search the universe and find what they are looking for on planet Earth. The Antons place a time-travel device in the hands of Gus Wilder, an American engineer of the twenty-first century, hoping he will serve as their emissary in dealing with earthlings of the thirty-first century. They influence Gus to travel a thousand years into the future where he finds an advanced society who have, by overcoming every human frailty and providing for every need, created a paradise on earth. These people of the thirty-first century live long into the future and strive for immortality. Gus meets and falls in love with Jan-3, an incredibly beautiful woman of the thirty-first century. The Antons tell him why he was chosen and, if he fails, they will destroy planet Earth. Together Gus and Jan-3 set out to save humanity. Can they fulfill their destiny?