Old Buttons

Toward the end of this post from about a year ago, I included a photo of a bottle of buttons my husband brought home.  I wrote a little about them then but since National Button Day is November 16, I thought I'd do the promised follow-up post.  (I'm a day late due to internet problems.)  Those buttons were so dirty!  I wondered if they'd been rescued after a flood or had spilled on a barn floor and been swept up with a broom and dustpan.  Some needed to be scrubbed with a toothbrush, others were rusty, and still others were just old and marred.

I soaked them in water with a little Dawn dish soap.  I was surprised to see that some of them became bendable. 

After they dried, they became hard again.

I put them on a towel to dry, then sorted them by color, material, style, etc.

There were some creamy buttons,

a few colored buttons,

and buttons with thread still in their holes, evidence that they'd been removed from clothing.  Old buttons!  Old thread and old style of sewing on buttons, too.

Some buttons were made from shells,

others were plastic or wood or metal.

Some buttons had embossed shapes

and some were pressed or molded metal.

There were many maimed buttons, the poor things, all the life worn out of them. 

Others, though battered, could still be used in a pinch, if one did not care about appearances. 

Stars were carved into some of the shell buttons, and one plastic button had a star, too.

Other shell buttons had "eyes" carved around the holes, perhaps so the threads wouldn't get too worn.

And then there were the white, plastic buttons, impressed with a variety of designs, buttons I remember from my mother's and grandmother's house dresses when I was a child.

And there were several buttons with two holes side-by-side near an edge.  For decoration only?

There were some metal buttons, some with an anchor, probably for the U.S. Navy, and a few plain metal buttons.

They cleaned up pretty well, don't you think, comparing the detailed photos above with the photo below?

My mom had a button box, a round metal tin, painted a light teal blue with a flower decal on the top.  Didn't every frugal housewife of the 1940s and 1950 have a button box of some kind or another?  Most of the buttons in my mom's box had been rescued from old and tattered clothing.  I loved sifting them through my fingers, sorting them by color or size, imagining the dresses the buttons had adorned.  I still have a button box (or two).  Do you?

--Nancy.