Button Collector

I've probably mentioned this before, but am going to write a little bit about it again today. I'm a button collector. I started collecting antique and vintage clothing buttons in 2003 after deciding hatpins were not my thing, although I appreciate them and still have a few in the china cabinet in the dining room.

I knew absolutely nothing about buttons other than when my French Canadian great-grandmother moved in with my family in the 1960's in an apartment attached to our house, she brought along a wicker basket full of buttons. It was one of those 1920s/30s baskets with the Chinese coins and beads on the lid. When I visited her I'd lie on the floor after taking the button basket out of the closet and dump all the buttons out onto the rug, then sort them by color or shape, or by metal and plastic. We raided her button basket for buttons to use as replacement game pieces, to sew on Barbie doll and baby doll clothes, and to replace buttons on our play clothes that had gotten lost.

That was the extent of my exposure to buttons until 2003. I don't know what made me think of buttons when my friend Darlene and I were looking for something small and easy to store to collect. We found the local button club, Crescent Club, by means of a Google search, and discovered the Massachusetts State Button Society. I contacted the secretary of he Crescent Club to ask about the club. Within a day Darlene and I were invited to a member's home for their monthly meeting. The topic that day was Sporting & Hunt Buttons. Honestly, neither one of us had never even heard of those kinds of buttons! But we sat around Martha's dining room table admiring the brass and white metal (and possibly gilt and silver) buttons with stags, deer, rabbits, foxes, boars, hunting dogs, pheasants, etc embossed on them. The watchcase gilt buttons were breathtaking!

Buttons, we discovered weren't cheap to collect, but some kinds were affordable, such as black glass and some clear and colored glass, plastics, metals, wood, and leather buttons. At one of the next few meetings I saw my first charmstring and from that developed a passion for collecting them to the point where I now own 99 of them. I'm shooting for 100. Many of them can be viewed at a blog Kelly created for displaying our collection: charmstringmuseum.blogspot.com  She and I have been too busy to post updates recently (well, for maybe 3 years now) but hope to do so in the near future.

Anyway- we began attending Massachusetts State Button Society shows (held four times a year) and collecting buttons. Soon, buttons were taking over my house, and part of Darlene's collection was also stored in my basement! Small buttons, when mounted on 9x12" cards and slipped into protective sleeves and stored in file box cartons take up a sizeable chunk of space! John converted the walkout basement bedroom to a hobby room for me, but although my button collection is still there, all Kelly's stuff from college and things she's been collecting for her own house are blocking access to the boxes of buttons.  The room is still fairly full of buttons of all kinds.

We've met some amazing women and even a handful of men who collect. Our late friend Pauline's house was like a button museum with custom crafted slide drawer cabinets that displayed a portion of her fabulous collection! Her enclosed porch held the rest of her collection in tall lateral file cabinets, cartons, shelves, bins, etc. There was always new buttons to look at and admire when we visited, and she generously gave us duplicates of buttons she had and occasionally let us chose others from cards she'd won in various auctions because she wanted one button from the cards for her collection and didn't care about the others!

Yesterday, Kelly and I went to the button show in Three Rivers after missing shows since last fall due to health reasons and trolley museum schedule conflicts. There are fewer members attending shows these days, fewer dealers showing buttons, but we each found buttons for our collections. I found two camel buttons I didn't already have (I have four or five cards of camel buttons- so finding ones I don't have is a rare event!) I also found two skull buttons I didn't have for my skull button card. Who would ever think there were so many skull and skeleton buttons around? But- you can find just abut any subject matter on a button from apples to zebras. I have butterflies, roosters, mermaids, bells, the Eiffel Tower, Charlie Chaplin, Sarah Bernhardt, cats, dogs, foxes, deer, just to name a few subjects on buttons. You can find other famous people, scenes, buildings, plant life, and birds on buttons, You can also find storybook characters, mythology characters and subjects, Aesop's fable images, and opera subjects. Then there are glass buttons made using a multitude of techniques. Kelly has been assembling a charmstring of all swirlback glass buttons from the mid to late 1800's. It now contains over 1,000 buttons and they're all different!

I was editor of the Massachusetts State Button Society Bulletin from 2007 through 2016, the last year it was produced. When I resigned as editor of the then annual 42-page Bulletin, no one else had the motivation to continue with the magazine. It was a labor of love that Kelly (photo editor and contributing writer) and I (editor and contributing writer) did each spring. I miss putting it together, but no longer have the time to do it now that I'm busy writing my own books and working full time.

I still have a passion for buttons and probably always will. My mission is to preserve the charmstrings (one dates back to 1874) for as long as I can before they fall into the hands of dealers who disassemble them to sell the buttons individually- some are quite valuable, but to me the intact strings are even more valuable because you can get a sense of a family's history from studying the types of buttons on each string- such as what branch of the military they served in, political affiliations, a sense of economics if the buttons are ordinary or extraordinary, and also by the various mementoes found on the strings like rings, love tokens, medals, broken bits of jewelry, doll tea set spoons, etc.

It was a fun day yesterday hunting for new buttons for my collection. I even brought home a graveyard scene studio button made by our Crescent Club President, Lorna!  Looking forward to the November button show, the last one of the year, also n Three Rivers, MA.

Playing with buttons today!