Grainne Morton loves buttons. The 39-year-old jewellery maker has been collecting them for as long as she can remember — not just ordinary buttons but the intricate, antique, mother-of-pearl and shell ones that she came across at antiques fairs. After art college, when she decided to focus all her efforts on jewellery, she realised she had a surplus of materials to get her started.

“Originally, I just used little buttons and that just escalated,” she says. “When I was at Edinburgh College of Art my parents, who own an antiques shop, would come to see me and combine it with a trip to the antiques fair at Ingliston and I would pick up bits and pieces for inspiration.

“Things have changed and I can now buy what I want over the internet. It’s taken a lot of research even just to work out what things are called. It’s still time consuming but it’s more concentrated.”

After being born and brought up in Northern Ireland, Morton moved to Edinburgh in the late 1980s to study. She later spent a year in the Republic of Ireland training with the Craft Council of Ireland before moving back to Scotland to set up her jewellery business, making earrings, necklaces, brooches and bracelets — all by hand, using traditional jewellery techniques in a contemporary way.

“The found objects I use in my work are, in the main, the inspiration for my work,” she says. “I collect objects from the obscure to the miniature: vintage buttons, ephemera and vintage cabochons. In most of my designs, I aspire to evoke a feeling of nostalgia.

“Many of the found objects I use are quite childlike, the kind of little trinkets you would have got in crackers in the 1930s and 1940s.

A lot of the elements I use in my jewellery reminds people of their childhood, and I think that often makes people very happy.”

Morton sells her creations through her online shop, but her jewellery has been stocked in department stores around the world, including at such famous names as Barneys and Liberty.

In 2007, she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Applied Arts Prize.

While Morton thinks of herself as a craft maker, she is aware that the job title comes with certain preconceptions. She says: “It’s a tricky one, because you don’t want to offend people who are making things as a hobby, but I’ve got a degree at postgraduate level and have put a lot of work in over the years. Craft isn’t just about the little fair at the town hall — although that’s great, too — and hopefully the C Word campaign will highlight just how highly skilled crafts can be.”

For more information on Grainne Morton’s work, visit www.craftscotland.org

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