Expensive Embellishment

Remember the plain denim bag I thought needed some embellishment?

I made yo-yos out of the lining fabric and appliquéd them, then thought I'd use buttons to cover the centre holes.

First I searched through my button jar, but really I have few green buttons. The only ones I had three of were the very dull square ones you might be able to see at the bottom of this shot.  I contemplated using the golden-brown ones that I have a tube-full of, but I wasn't quite happy with them.  So I bought a button-covering kit, (the red and yellow bits in the centre of the picture) to make matching buttons.  The kit was supposed to make 8 buttons, but so far I have destroyed 4 of them without making one usable button.  Results - a few mangled pieces of aluminium (two visible in photo), one "almost" button, quite a bit of frustration.  Today I went shopping to find 3 green shank buttons.  Good idea, but none available!  How can that be?  Anyway, I bought the smiley yellow flowers.  Total cost so far - nearly $9 for three buttons that aren't really what I wanted!  (Edit: - Plus the cost of the yo-yo maker.  I had forgotten about that!)

Who knows, maybe I'll just end up removing all traces of embellishment.