button, button

This is week two of Quill Cottage's Laura Ingalls Wilder blog-a-thon: "Beautiful buttons." For more information, click on the linked photo in the sidebar.

There are all sorts of buttons mentioned in the "Little House" books, not only plain ones but buttons shaped like blackberries, brass, cut-steel, dog-head, gilt, gold with a castle design, horn, jet, pearl, shoe, and wooden. We learn from The Long Winter (Chapter 19) that Ma Ingalls keeps her buttons in a button bag. I keep mine in a blue mason jar. I also have the metal Scotch tape can that my mother always kept her buttons in; she gave it to me when I moved back to Georgia. My favorites it are brass buttons from my father's Navy uniform, leather buttons from my parents' winter coats, and little mother-of-pearl buttons from a favorite dress of mine from kindergarden; they had two holes at one edge, which I always thought was really special.

I never thought about collecting buttons until I read 121 Pudding Street in elementary school. The book was published in 1955 and is by Jean Fritz, and there's a "Little House" connection; Fritz won The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1986. In 121 Pudding Street, one of the characters (Miss Pursey, you can see her in the book illustration in the photo above) collects buttons, which are everywhere in her house.

In one of the older Victoria magazines, there was an article about button strings, similar to what Mary and Laura made for Baby Carrie in On the Banks of Plum Creek (Chapter 13). For the past couple of years, I've strung buttons for my LH Christmas tree. I don't really have many "fancy" buttons like Caroline Ingalls collected, but I do have a button from a War of Northern Aggression uniform. My favorite buttons are either wooden or made of deer antler. I'm also partial to tiny little baby buttons and old, interesting white buttons. I inherited my grandmother's treadle sewing machine, and there was a little jar of buttons in one of the drawers. Over thirty years ago (wow) I used some of them to make the oval pin shown at left.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:13 PM