Vintage Thingies Thursday

Thanks Marian, for the low-down on ‘vintage thingies Thursday’, and for Confessions of an Apron Queen for hosting this fun post. In the future, I’ll be sharing a variety of fun vintage finds with you. Today its more buttons, coz that’s what I’ve got lots of photos of, so here goes. These are lovely old shop cards of buttons from the 1930s/40s with pictures of people.

  

Doctors and nurses anyone??

  

Or maybe a spot of golf? Those were the days, when a man wore a tie to play golf…

  

 

 

These pearl buttons are so lovely!

These are just a few of the fun button cards that I’ve come across. Lots more buttons to come in future posts! Have a great week!

My once a year find….

I’ve been waiting for today for a whole year. Its the one day of the year that I can visit a fair where I know there is a great stash of vintage buttons. These beauties are from a shop that would have closed down in the 1940s, and I found the most beautiful assortment of colours and designs. These are made from an early plastic called casein (which is the protein in milk). Mixed with a few chemicals it makes a great plastic, and though it has since been replaced by more modern polymers, it is still made in countries that produce a lot of milk, eg New Zealand. Anyway, enough of the chemistry, check these out!

I love the shape of this one!

These are magnificent! They’re reverse carved and painted lucite in immaculate condition!

 I literally bought hundreds of buttons today – all on old shop cards. It was so much fun!

Op shop finds

I know a lovely lady who works for a charity shop. She found my stall at a vintage fair and she had brought some buttons along to try and sell them. I was so busy that she left them with me to take home and have a look through. I bought the whole lot! That was 2 years ago, and I told her that I’d buy any buttons that come her way. So now I regularly receive a 3kg parcel in the mail. This is some of the goodies that awaited me last week:

                                         

Look at that lovely handpainted wooden buckle!

This one I could probably live without….. it’s a buckle, and rather heavy:

Thanks Julie!

Button entropy

I decided to call the first post on my blog “Button Entropy”, partly because I am addicted to, obsessed with and inspired by buttons; partly because I am also a scientist and we’ve playing around with scientific words on a science-inspired art thread I belong to; and partly because entropy perfectly describes the way my house has become since I started collecting buttons.

Some web definitions of entropy:

“Quantitative measure of the disorder of a system. The greater the disorder, the higher the entropy.”

“Entropy is a measure of energy that is expended in a physical system but does no useful work, and tends to decrease the organizational order of the system.”

This is the high level of entropy in my house:

Dining room table

 

Spare??  room

 

 Another spare room!!

Enough said. Lets talk more about buttons. I adore vintage buttons. I love the workmanship and detail that went into creating them. I love that they weren’t spat out by the thousands in a production line. I love that you can pick up a beautiful old button and feel the history there, imagine the clothing it adorned and the person who wore it. And I love that you can still wear it today on a contemporary piece of clothing.

Over the past few years I have amassed literally thousands and thousands of vintage buttons, and every time I buy another lot, I can still find something I’ve never seen before. It’s like owning a miniature art collection. So it’s time time to share some of my treasures with like-minded enthusiasts. I’ll be posting images and related information on lots of different types of buttons over the coming months. So grab a cup of your favourite beverage, sit back and enjoy!

Well, a good place to start off would be to show you my favourite buttons. It’s a difficult job to single out a top favourite, but these wonderful black and cream 1920s buttons are up there with the best of them. They’re made of celluloid, and are so Deco!

         

So if you have some favourites to share, drop me a line!

And happy birthday to my mum – 84 candles today!

Until next time – cheers!