Grandma's Buttons

When I was a child my brother and I used to spend every school holiday at our grandparents' house, either my dad's parents or my mum's parents. Both were happy to have us and used to spend a lot of quality time with us. They would take us out to various places and we would also spend a good deal of time indoors making things. Funnily enough, one of our favourite activities was sorting out my grandma's button collection. She was from the wartime make do and mend generation so not only did she make a lot of her own clothes (and ours!) but she would reuse bits of old clothes wherever possible. This recylcing nature would be highly admired in today's culture. It meant that buttons, zips and other fastenings were snipped off old clothes and stored in an appropriate old margarine or ice-cream tub. As a result of years of this she had accumulated several hundred buttons, some individual, other in matching sets, and all jumbled together in a yellowing ice-cream tub. I don't know how she ever found the button(s) she needed for the clothes she was making!

So, every now and then, my brother and I would sort the buttons out - usually by colour - inspecting and admiring each of them as we did. We had our favourites, of course. And when the job was done we would put them all back into the ice-cream tub in a big muddle, ready for the next rainy day. After years of doing this, and with the wisdom of age, we decided that once we had sorted them out we ought to keep them sorted. So we tied matching sets together on pieces of thread and we put buttons of each colour into separate plastic bags. And that was that. Never again did the button collection need sorting.

When I was 18 years old my grandma died and one of the things I inherited for her house was a drawer. In the drawer was a lifetime of sewing thread and her button collection, still individually bagged by colour. Since having my own house this drawer has lived on a shelf in my garage and occasionally I use some thread out of it. Then, this weekend I decided to make some sock glove puppets with my children and I knew that I would find the perfect buttons for the job in my grandma's button collection. At first I only brought out one bag of buttons but so intrigued was my eldest daughter by the buttons that she asked me to bring in the whole collection.

She studied the buttons with fascination, just as I had done, holding up some to show me... the same ones that had been my favourites. The smell of my grandma's house still clung to the buttons and added to my memories. As she sorted I emailed my brother to tell him what she was doing. "Awesome," came the reply, "what fun that was!". Then, over the next half hour, the button gradually become more and more muddled up as she opened bag after bag. And then by bedtime the buttons were in a big heap, the plastic bags (mostly with holes in due to age) discarded to one side. I fetched an empty metal biscuit tin from the kitchen and we scooped them all into it. And there they shall remain, in a big muddle, until the next rainy day when two little girls will ask if they can sort out my button collection!