Cute as a Button

I have an obsessive knack of keeping things that are ultimately pointless in the long run. Call it collecting, call it hoarding, call me a pack rat, all of the above will apply. A few examples of this are my movie ticket stubs, (some dating back to 1999...yes that is 11 years of holding onto a ticket stub for no good reason) fortunes from practically every fortune cookie I have ever consumed (ok kind of a lie, I don't really like eating the fortune cookie, but I enjoy fortunes and breaking fragile cookies), and extra buttons that come with your new clothing in case you lose the ones already attached (I would like it to be known I have never lost a button that I know of, and should this happen one day I am confident I could attempt to sew it back on and I would give myself a 90% chance of success). Well one day an idea popped into my head to rid myself of these buttons that were piling up in my jewelry box and justify the fact that I have been stowing them away "just in case". Here is said result:

Cute enough right ;)
I bought a plain wooden frame at JoAnn's, painted to sides of it yellow, mod podged scrapbooking paper and stickers on, glued on some ribbon and finally the oh so useful button collection and ta-da, a new picture frame for Logan and an empty spot in my jewelry box for the next meaningless object I feel the need to keep.
As I was putting on the 'cute as a button' stickers it occurred to me...why is a button so cute? So thank you google for leading me to this answer to why the phrase came to be:

"cute as a button isn't the original phrase. The word cute is derived from the 1731 english meaning of the word acute, bright or clever. So being as acute as a button makes more sense as it's refering to the shine of polished brass buttons that make them stand out from others... more commonly known as "as bright as a button"; but seeing as this phrase derived from "as acute as a button" (where acute meant clever in 1731) it's easy to see how people mistook it for cute and so the phrase was redirected at cute little things and the meaning of cute was changed over the years... so yes, it came from acute as a button, which mean bright as a button, which has the obvious origins in shiny brass buttons that stood out from the dark coats that the queens men used to wear.

Another reasonable explanation, is that the word cute is right, but the word button doesn't refer to a shirt button, but a flower bud, such as the popular name of small flowers called a "bachelor's button". Which obviously makes more sense as baby flowers are much cuter than shirt buttons."
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/184286