Tiny Tuesday : : A Button

This morning's paper brought the directive that everybody is to wear some sort of face covering when we are inside any building except our home and outside when it is not possible to maintain a six foot distance from any other person. My guess is that the health department is trying to figure out what the next step is toward letting us out...

I am going to try to make a quilt out of all the fabrics I have used to make face masks....I made every mask out of a different fabric and still have hundreds more. I just don't have much inspiration about how to order them all into a pleasing design. From past experience, the answer is "less is more", but in the past I have had an entire fabric store at my disposal. This will have to be something altogether different. 

Next to the boxes and boxes of fabric is another box...my button box. Well, not entirely my button box. It contains buttons from my grandmother as well as John's grandmother. I suspect that back in their day everyone had a button box. I have put a picture in extras of the contents of the grandmothers' button box as well as a very old tin cigarette box full of what I believe are men's shirt buttons. 

Nobody would bother to save those anymore, just as nobody darns socks anymore, and although she had many talents, sewing was not one of my mother's talents, so I doubt if my mother added much to the button box, but she obviously kept it because now I have it. 

These days, nearly every garment comes with a little envelope or plastic bag with an extra button or two in it. And what are we supposed to do with these buttons. Put them in the button box, of course. I can't think of a single time I've ever sewed on one of these buttons, but they do make quite a memorable collection.

I had a friend who made dog collars and bracelets out of old buttons and she told me about a tiny store in Berkeley that carried nothing but loose buttons. The woman who ran it said that her husband had been a tailor and had a massive collection of buttons. He opened this tiny shop just to sell the ones he didn't use. By the time he died, he was no longer making clothes, but the button store was quite a success and his wife continued to run it for many years.

Even the little white men's shirt buttons tell a story, partly because of the tin they are in but also because they bring to mind a former time, when our grandmothers turned shirt collars, mended socks and sewed buttons back on shirts.

I bought the button shown in the main picture at a yarn store which also had a small collection of unusual buttons. I can't remember ever sewing them on anything....

Thanks to Mary ElizaR for hosting the Tiny Tuesday challenge this month.