Do kids even play this game anymore? Am I showing my age by saying that I played it a lot? I don’t even remember how you won it, I just remember that a player started off with a button in her palms and went around the circle of kids playing. She dropped the button in one person’s palm. You couldn’t tell. Then I forget what was next.
According to Wikipedia, there are several versions of the game – the one I remember apparently had no winner – it was just a guessing game. I like that!
Why buttons on this dreary Sunday morning in March with snow predicted in the D.C. metro area?
Last night I wanted buttons for my top and got into Momma’s button box. It’s actually a cookie tin but it’s where she kept her buttons and I have played in it for as far back as I can remember. Momma has been gone for 40+ years now, but still have her buttons and know that there are buttons in here that she has touched. It’s sort of like keeping a couple of her pots and bowls.
I wound up sorting a bunch of white into a half-full jar of white buttons I bought at the thrift store a couple of years back, because you know, buttons: you just never know when a craft is going to call for them.
I have button cards with buttons marked 25 cents for 6 to 8 buttons. Some are marked from Grants (a pricier five and dime if I remember correctly. Do I need to say I haven’t thought of Grants in forever – and wouldn’t have ever again without the button cards.). You KNOW how old they are!
I ran out of space in the jar. Maybe this morning after I’m done with this I’ll shift it over to a larger container so all the whites are in one place.
There are some wonderful old buttons, one offs. I packaged some in a baby food jar, which fits in the button tin (I had a bunch of those jars but they went away when I moved – of course) and and some in tiny zip lock bags that came with repair buttons from clothes over the years. Apparently I never keep the clothes long enough to need the button or I’m just good at not losing buttons. At any rate, I consolidated a lot of one-button packages into others by color.
There are so many buttons with thread in them that I know were cut off clothes before the clothes were scrapped – people used to be thrifty. Or maybe just my Momma, who grew up poor, literally on the wrong side of the tracks in a tiny Mississippi town which Wikipedia says was “located in an agricultural area, the city had a stop on the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, which carried many migrants north out of the area in the first half of the 20th century.
“Bluesman Robert Johnson referred to this city in his song “Travelling Riverside Blues“, as did Lucinda Williams in her song “2 Kool to be 4 Gotten”. Eric Clapton with the band Cream famously referred to Rosedale in their hit song, Crossroads, in deference to Robert Johnson and his legendary crossroads.”
My aunt lived her whole life there, first in her childhood home and then in the home she and her husband hand built.
Now we throw everything away.
I’m liking the return to caring through slow sewing which I was introduced to through a private on-line Facebook page, and to Alabama Chanin designs by Natalie Chanin whose work I love and am currently borrowing from as I learn that I am perfectly capable of slow-sewing (hand sewing) and how meditative it is. Plus I may get something wearable out of it (I am bad at figuring out my size via patterns, plus did you know that patterns range in the $15+ to buy these days?!!! Who knew?).
I also love some of the japanese sewing styles, used for patching, that I’m learning about (whether or not they are new to others they are new to me): boro (basically a running stitch) and sashiko (boro over patches that are over other patches) and applying to repairing my old blue jean quilt.
That’s what I’m up to these days, how about you?
1 Comment
Nice! I still save buttons on anything that is going to be trashed. Not sure why. Been years since I have sewn my own clothes and needed buttons–LOL! But there’s something about buttons. 😉
I never played that game, though. We did play Duck, Duck, Grey Duck, though…which I’ve heard in other parts of the country is called Duck, Duck, Goose.