little things

These buttons belonged to Jim's nan. When she died last year there were jokes about who got the button tin, but I wanted it and I wasn't joking. She cut the buttons off everything before disposing of it, and it was quite a nice tin too, and I liked her and I liked buttons having spend many hours with my mum's button tin as a child.

These buttons are made of the inside of a shell. They look plastic, but they are hard and cold and the back looks like shell. They've been carefully shaped, it must have taken ages. I don't think they are special buttons, maybe just shirt buttons. I wonder about their life... maybe they are very old, some are quite worn. Maybe have been used of many different clothes, carefully salvaged each time and put into button tins that were handed down.

There are plastic white buttons too, they have clearly been made to look like these. Probably it mattered at one time, that they look like expensive buttons, but were cheap plastic. I'd never considered it, what buttons were made of. Now buttons are all disposable and plastic and no one bothers to save then before binning their clothes.