Button Hunter Bliss

I had the amazing good luck to find not one, not two, but THREE button lots yesterday. The first two were from my favorite thrift store. They were packaged up in two separate bags but I can tell they came from the same sewing box since there were matching items in both. I found the jar at an estate sale.

Let me tell you a little about the woman who owned the first two lots. Where to begin... She was a quilter. There were 7 thimbles in all and one of them is leather. One is plastic and from the 15th annual International Quilt Festival in Houston Texas. That show is in it's 35th years now. It must have been quite a thrill for her to attend! She valued beautiful things. Some of the buttons were surely her mother's or maybe her grandmother's. There are bone underwear buttons - how long since anyone used THOSE! There are mirror-back twinkles, red glass (yes RED glass!); you don't see many of those. She knew to save them. There is a green art-deco style buckle and a few beautiful rhinestones. There are MANY mother-of-pearl buttons. Some of them very tiny like you found on baby clothes back before we realized buttons weren't the safest thing on baby clothes. I think she had girls. The only "manly" trinket in the lot was a lone marble but there were quite a few beads and stray jewelry findings. And the most touching thing of all - a baby tooth. Big sigh.

An afternoon of poking and sorting and button box bliss! Maybe I'll take a few close-up shots a little later and post those so you can see the really cool ones and I can get some practice with that "macro" setting on the camera. Good excuse - right? Besides, I'll get to poke through them some more......