I finished sorting the treasure chest of buttons last night and this is the booty. It was a lot of work because this was an especially filthy tin of buttons but the results were well worth the effort. There were quite a few buttons that I have never seen before, more leather buttons and shoe/glove buttons than I have EVER seen in one box before, very few modern plastics, a lot of glass and no metals. Not a typical button box.
The buttons above are the most unusual and I am hoping someone will read this and educate me. They feel like some sort of composite material and seem to be molded around a metal shank. You can see the backside of one in the center at the very bottom. Those N or Z shapes are sparkly and there are sparkles in the art deco fans. A lot of buttons have passed through my hands but none like these.
These look like wood but they are not. The brown is a shell of what appears to be a thin plastic or celluloid that is molded over a metal base that holds the glass dome in the center. Another unusual type I haven't seen before.
These pressed milk glass buttons depict a raised gold accordion player.
These black buttons are smaller but have the same design.
Dyed pink mother of pearl ball-shaped buttons. Love these!
I should have put something in this picture for scale so you could tell just how teeny-tiny those MOP buttons in the center are. I know they are diminutives but I call the MOP ones baby buttons and they get their own special spot in my collection.
And speaking of diminutives! These are not really buttons, they are very tiny, sew-on, black glass rhinestones. The rhinestones had fallen out of every single one and it took me a while to put one and one together and realize they went together. I rescued them all out of the dirt and debris in the bottom of the tin and will attempt to put them back together. I have re-glued the rhinestones in buttons before but nothing so tiny so we will see how that will go!
