cosymakes

one of the things that i like most about buttons, besides the fact that they’re colorful, shiny, useful and fun, is that they connect me to other women. yesterday we took a little road trip to steveston, a lovely historic fishing village at the bottom of an ugly suburb just below vancouver.

there, susan took amanda, i and the littles to her favorite thrift store where she went every week for the last 4 months while her daughter was at musical drama practice. they had lots of very lovely buttons – but what i bought is not the point of this story – the point is that they were carefully tied together, attached to little squares of paper with holes punched in them and the prices carefully written on by hand.

at the mennonite thrift store where i volunteered for the last two years, there was a button woman who carefully sorted, priced, and packaged all of the buttons. other women cut the buttons from clothing before they sent them to the rag-picker.

there is something unseen about buttons that is precious. for me, it shows in the many button stories that included the community that came together over buttons in some way or another – whether it is to sew them on, rejoice over them, collect them and sort them, or to interact with each other in some other way. there is also a wonderful interaction of care for our environment and matter in general, a responsibility that i would call stewardship, when someone snips the buttons to be reused before the shirt become a rag.

so, in the end, i find that a button is not just a button.
thanks for the button entries, the contest is now closed and i’ll announce the two winners soon.
thanks for all of the feedback on the yarn poll, it is ever so helpful.
thanks for reading – the blog just went over 20,000 hits!