Well swell.....now you've all guilted me into coughing up one of the cutest ideas I've ever seen with buttons...actually I had forgotten about it, but the mention of "doily" made me remember it. I was at a friend's house and her mother-in-law (or someone) had gotten it for her. It was this beautiful tea cup and saucer. Inside the cup, and this is just what I could figure out by inspecting it. (It's always fun to have me over so I can dissect your really cool stuff)
It looked like a cup runneth over sort of. It had a doily sticking out, sort of, but then it looked like a huge mound of buttons and then there were some other things like those bird scissors and a few beautiful hat pins.

So I figured they must have hot glued a styrofoam ball inside; covered it with the doily so that the doily flounced out around the edges, but not perfectly even all the way around (THAT would be too symetrical and uninteresting) and then hot glued the buttons on top of that in little groups sort of what might "look" to the untrained eye like a haphazard pile, but really not. And then added the other stuff by just sticking them in.

I don't know if that sounds cute or not but it WAS!!!