Button Button

This button bouquet reminds me of a line drawing. It was made for the RAGS book and was photographed tucked into the band of a large black hat my sister wore a la Mary Poppins. It reminds me of the era when women wore hats with doodads on them. Cherries, big blowsy roses, bows and buttons.

I recognize, one of the blossoms, a shiny, black, faceted button as a long time resident of the button jar my mom kept. . Every stray button that wasn't in service went into this jar. It was full of a couple hundred buttons and I remember, as a girl, dumping it out, running my hands through them and inspecting each one. Some came from garments made long before I was born. Each was a story unto itself, though most of them I would never hear.

I have no idea what happened to that button jar and I wish I still had it around.
SA: 4.25.20 



Ah, the button corsage was created for Rags. It sits Minney Pearl like on a black hat portrait of me. Poor-girl-goes-to-town is the look. We conjured up a lot of projects to fill the pages of the book Rags. It started with what can you do with the bits left over from a lifetime of adolescent sewing. But even so the book required reaching deep into our imaginations to make 120 pages of scrappy projects. The Rag Sisters had to invent.

We were schooled in invention. Picking up a bone, or a feather, or a rock or an old sock, our mother Marie, often posed the question “What could you make out of this?” That question asked again and again forced me into thinking of everything as a possibility. A material. To think of transforming junk as a material. Discards became an opportunity to transform junk stuff into something useful or decorative.

We had made a button necklace, but what else? Could buttons be a corsage?
A pin? The answer was yes.
LA 4.30.20

PS. I probably have the button jar you are thinking of….. 

 Because like mom, I never throw anything away, without a fight.