Button, Button, Where’s That Button?

It all began pretty innocently.  It was 2020.  We were in the middle of the Pandemic.  My local guild wasn’t meeting, but the raffle quilt committee was in the middle of our construction process.  If you’re not familiar with Guild Raffle Quilts, allow me to clue you in on their importance.  The quilt is constructed, and tickets are sold for a chance to win the quilt.  The money raised by this activity go to fund guild activities, such as speakers for programs and paying the rent for the guild’s meeting place.  Normally a quilt show goes along with the raffle quilt and between those two fund raisers, a guild finds itself in a reasonable economic place for a couple of years.

In 2020, there were no quilt shows because the Pandemic was in full-force, and everything was cancelled.  Which meant all of our guild’s funding would have to come from the sale of raffle quilt tickets.  Which also meant, Pandemic or no Pandemic, our raffle quilt must go on.  Our chairperson had farmed out blocks, collected them and constructed the center.  Janet and I were charged with the applique borders. 

And that’s when the “trouble” began.  Besides the fact we both like to applique, we both shared the same kind of humor and were former educators.  For several weeks, we’d meet on Friday mornings, work on the borders, and have lunch.  This wasn’t our first rodeo with raffle quilts together.  Janet had previously chaired the committee several times and I helped her.  However, in the isolation of the Pandemic, those Friday mornings were my islands of sanity in a sea of insanity.  Once the quilt was complete, we continued to meet on Fridays, asking a few additional friends to join us.

Which brings us to where we are now:  The Friday Grilled Cheese and Wine Club (GCWC for short). We (semi-regularly) explore grilled cheese recipes (because it is an all-around excellent sandwich) and pair those with appropriate wines.  In addition, someone may bring a soup, another a salad, and there is always dessert.  We also have morning tea with some type of goodie.  After all, we are a sophisticated bunch.  For several hours each Friday, Janet, Susan, and I work on our quilts.  Julie usually knits.  Julie is teaching me to knit.

Julie has the patience of a saint.

During the week, we send each other countless silly memes, but on occasion we also may pass along interesting tidbits of non-political news.  A few weeks ago, Janet sent me this: 

And asked if I had ever written a blog about buttons.  I couldn’t remember, so I googled my own blog, and the answer is, “No.”  I’ve mentioned buttons and how they influenced charm squares, but I’ve never devoted an entire blog to entirely buttons.  Well, that had to change.

Normally buttons are associated with garment construction.  I used so many buttons when I made my kids’ clothes, I honestly don’t think I put in more than a dozen zippers the entire time.  When buttons are mentioned, we think about buttonholes, clothing, and perhaps bags.   But quilters do use buttons.  We’ve used them as eyes for appliqued animals.  We’ve used them for the centers of flowers.  And on this quilt:

All those black dots aren’t tiny, black circles.  They’re buttons. Hundreds of them.  So what about buttons?  Why all the hoopla about some tiny, plastic disks which are generally used to hold our clothing on our bodies?  Afterall, a button is simply a fastener that joins two pieces of fabric together by slipping through a loop or sliding through a buttonhole.

Well, to begin with, buttons haven’t always been around, nor have they been used in garment or quilt construction.  We do tend to think of them as plastic disks, but in reality they may also be made of wood, metal, or seashell.  Buttons can be used on wallets and bags and may be used strictly for ornamentation. In the art world they can be used as an example of folk art, studio craft, or even a miniature work of art.  In archaeology, buttons can be significant artifacts. 

Before 2800 – 2600 BC, buttons didn’t exist.  They first appeared in the Indus Valley civilization during its Kot Diji phase, at the Tomb of the Eagles in Scotland, the Bronze age sites in China, and in Ancient Rome.  And at those times, they weren’t used as clothing fasteners.  They were ornaments or seals.  As a matter of fact it wasn’t until Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty we find buttons used as fasteners.  Prior to this they were used as clothing decorations.  The Egyptians used them in wig covers.  These buttons were formed from precious metals sewn onto strips of backing fabric.  Leatherwork from the Roman Empire incorporates some of the first buttonholes and buttons.  These buttons closed the legionary Loculus (satchel). 

Buttons were used to close cuffs by the Byzantine Empire and to fasten the necks of Egyptian tunics no later than the 5^th century.  In medieval times they were used in footwear.  During the 17^th century, box-like buttons were produced for smuggling drugs.  Buttons used during the World Wars were “locket” buttons.  Some of these buttons contained miniature, working compasses.  And during the Civil War, many uniform buttons were made of lead.  If a Union or Confederate company was running low on bullets, buttons could be melted down into ammunition. 

By 1918, the US government made an extensive survey of the international button market and discovered buttons have been made from vegetable ivory, metal, glass, galalith, silk, linen, cotton-covered crochet, lead, snap fasteners, enamel, rubber, buckhorn, wood, horn, bone, leather, paper, pressed cardboard, mother-of-pearl, celluloid, porcelain, composition, tin, zinc, xylonite, stone, cloth-covered wooden forms, and papier-mache.  Currently hard plastic, seashell, metals, and wood are the most common materials used in button making and the others only used in premium or antique apparel.  Over 60% of the world’s button supply comes from Qiaotou, Yongjia County, China. 

Historically, buttons have also followed trends in fashion, applied aesthetics and applied visual arts.  Button manufacturers used techniques from jewelry making, ceramics, sculpture, painting, printmaking, metal working, weaving, etc.  Buttons have been decorated with cloisonne’, embroidery, filigree, portraits, enamel, open-metal work, and hundreds of other ways to make them not only functional clothing wear, but also mini works of art.  Structurally, buttons can be attached by a shank, a stud, snap fasteners, magnets, or have holes on the surface which can be sewn through.  There are buttons called toggles.  These are stick like buttons, with a cord attached at the center.  They are passed endways through a hole and then rotated sideways.  Some buttons are made from fabric, such as covered buttons. However, the Mandarin button (or frogs) are knobs made of intricately knotted strings and are closed with loops.  There are also worked or cloth buttons which are created by embroidering or crocheting tight stitches (usually with linen thread) over a knob or ring (called a form).  Dorsett buttons, handmade from the 17^th century to 1750 and Death head buttons are of this type. 

So much for the history of the button.  At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Great.  We have buttons.  All kinds of buttons for all kinds of purposes.  But are they really that special, and if they are what makes them so special?”  Well…the Victoria and Albert Museum believe that buttons hold cultural, historical, political, and artistic significance.  This wonderful British museum houses a vast collection of buttons in their jewelry collection.  So does America’s Smithsonian.  Hammond Turner and Sons, a button-making company in Birmingham, hosts an online museum with an image gallery and historical button-related articles, including an 1852 article on button-making by none other than Charles Dickens.  In the United States, large button collections are on display at the Waterbury Button Museum of Waterbury, Connecticut and the Keep Homestead Museum of Monson, Massachusetts, which also hosts an extensive button archive and in Gurnee, Illinois, at The Button Room. 

But….what if I told you that the button…the common, cute, button has a surprisingly semi-scandelous past?

We know buttons didn’t appear until almost 5,000 years ago.  This particular button was made of a curved shell.  Most of the buttons used during this time didn’t appear in nice, straight rows.  Nope.  They were used here and there – no rhyme or reason – as sartorial flourishes.  Along with brooches, buckles, and straight pins, buttons were used in Ancient Rome as decorate closures for flowing garments.  However…the buttons didn’t work perfectly (as did none of the other options).  When a Roman person tried to support yards of cloth at a single point, the buttons used were took architectural heft and were made of bone, horn, bronze, or wood.  Some Roman clothing designers would opt for knotting the fabric securely into position, then topped the knot off with a purely ornamental button. 

It is also worth noting the Mycenaeans of the Roman era invented the fibula – a surprising modern forerunner to our safety pin.  The design was lost with them until it re-emerged in mid-19^th century America. 

All of this button finagling finally brought the button into the arena of its “sort of sexy” past during the Middle Ages.  Granted we don’t normally look at something like this

And think, “Gee…that’s kind of attractive.

But folks did during the Middle Ages – especially among the wealthy.  Around the middle of the eleventh century, clothes began to be made so close-fitting that they followed the lines of the body from the shoulders to the hips like a glove (Carl Kohler, A History of Costume).  Buttons helped with that snug fit along.  This didn’t mean clothes were cut more sparingly; wealthy people still liked the costly display of excess fabric.  But, on both men’s and women’s clothes, buttons helped accentuate the lines of the arm and bustline.  As a matter of fact, so many buttons were used, sumptuary laws were written to restrict their use. 

During the Middle Ages, buttons came in all shapes and sizes, but most of them had a shank.  Folks during this time preferred the shank because use of the shank meant the face of the button could be decorated freely.  The more expensive the button’s decoration, the more they were worth.  Wearing lots of buttons during this time meant money.  Franco Jacassi, reputed the world’s biggest button-collector, describes the Middle Ages as a time when you could pay off a debt by plucking a precious button from whatever you were wearing.  Italians still describe the rooms where powerful leaders met as stanze dei bottoni, or “rooms of the buttons.”

On women’s clothing particularly, buttons traced the body’s lines in all kinds of suggestive ways, making clothes tight in all the right placing or (a-hem) offering intriguing points of entry.  Along with ribbons, laces, or bows, buttons were often used on detachable sleeves, a fad which ran from the 13^th to 15^th centuries.  These sleeves could easily be swapped between outfits and laundered whenever they got dirty.  Courtiers might accept an unbuttoned sleeve from a lady as a love token or wave sleeves in jubilation at a jousting tournament. 

After the Renaissance in Europe, buttons, along with most things, became increasingly baroque, then rococo.  Among the most extreme examples were “habitat” buttons, built to contain keepsakes like dried flowers, hair cuttings, or tiny insects under glass.  Buttons were also hollowed out and allowed thieves to transport jewels and other booty secretly (a crime which was revived in a buttons-for-crime heroin-smuggling attempt in 2009). 

America finally entered the “buttons are for so much more than just holding your clothes on your body” phase around 1789 when George Washington’s inauguration gave the world its first political button.  Made of copper, brass, or Sheffield plate, these buttons could close a pair of pants or a jacket while simultaneously announcing the wearer’s politics.  Political buttons took on a more recognizably modern (and less functional) shape during Lincoln’s 1864 re-election campaign.  Buttons also were produced to announce his death and were on many mourning clothes during that time. 

However, it’s worth noting that buttons, like many items produced for those who could afford them, also have a shady past, too.  Folks who couldn’t afford the nice buttons for mourning or celebrations still wanted them.  But instead of purchasing them from a shop or button vendor, they had to craft them laboriously by hand. 

In Colonial America until the early 20^th century, working-class families counted themselves lucky if they had a hand-held button mold.  The mold was heated in a bed of hot coals, then filled with molten lead or pewter, which set into a button shape.  The sturdy metal buttons could then be covered with fabric or other cheaper embellishments. 

Extra buttons made at home could also be sold, which meant button-making could be hellish piecework.  Playwright Henrik Ibsen channeled his own awful memories of home button-molding in a pivotal scene in Peer Gynt.  Sent to fetch Gynt’s soul, the Button-Molder explains how the very good and very bad go to heaven and hell, but the middling-good are “merged in the mass” and poured into purgatory, an undifferentiated molten stream.  Charles Dickens, in an article from Household Words, welcomes the “miracle” of automated button manufacturing.  The writer describes how engravers cut steel dies into the latest fashionable shape, while women and children stamped out pasteboard and cloth to cover the buttons by machine.  Another machine stamped out the four holes which were becoming popular for men’s dress shirts, while another was used to “countersink” the button, pressing its center to form a raised outer ridge.

Just like with sewing machines (see this blog: https://sherriquiltsalot.com/2023/09/13/the-sewing-machine-renaissance-part-i/), a rash of patents soon clogged the patent office.  These patents protected nearly every aspect of button-making, from manufacturing methods for glass or mother-of-pearl buttons to cheaper wire buttons.  Even the button display cards were patented, and every improvement – either to the button or the display – brought around another file full of patents. 

However, don’t think that all this mass production of buttons slowed down the manufacturing of special and ornamental ones.  If you know anything about the various meanings behind flowers, the Victorian “Tussie-Mussie” buttons may be of interest. 

These buttons pictured tiny bouquets of flowers which held symbolic messages.  After King Albert’s death, Queen Victoria donned mourning buttons of carved black jet, kicking off a fashion among bereaved button-wearers. 

Once buttons became cheap enough to produce en masse, buttons by the hundreds lined most kinds of tight-fitting clothing, including shoes.  More buttons, closely spaced, gave the wearer the tightest fit.  But this fashion also presented a problem. Fingers were not very adept at fastening rows of closely-spaced buttons in tight, closely-spaced buttonholes.  The solution was the invention of a tool called the buttonhook.  This device looked like a crochet hook and could draw tiny, closely-spaced buttons through tight, closely-spaced buttonholes quickly. 

Today, despite the fact we have zippers and Velcro, the buttons are still used in clothing.  Buttons are dependable.  Zippers can jam, warp, or break.  Velcro (when used on clothing) is itchy and stiff.  And if it gets tangled with threads and other debris, it won’t stay fastened.  Hooks and eyes and snaps can be awkward to fasten and unfasten.  Buttons are easier.  And if the thread breaks and they have to be replaced, it’s a lot easier to sew on a new button than it is to replace a zipper. 

So now that you probably know more about buttons than you ever wanted to, you have to be asking yourself how this:

Came from this:

Our Grilled Cheese and Wine Club. 

The information Janet sent me definitely piqued my interest in buttons.  During my research I found out that buttons were made from shells.  Folks who lived along rivers would harvest these shells (usually freshwater clams). Workers used hollow bits to drill round button blanks from the shells.  

The blanks were sent to button factories, where they were made into finished buttons.  Between 150,000 and 200,000 pounds of shells were used at one button factory in Wisconsin.  The remainer of shells were ground up and used in road construction and as grit for chickens.  When Janet read the article she thought about her own button collection.

If you sew long enough – even if you don’t make garments – you tend to collect buttons.  Women who come from long lines of seamstresses and quilters generally not only have their own buttons, but also their mother’s, grandmother’s, and sometimes even their great-grandmother’s.  These collections can have buttons from shell:

And bone:

Not to mention the basic, plastic shirt buttons.  Generally there are some novelty and fancy ones, too.  Quite often you can purchase jars of antique buttons at antique stores and flea markets.  It’s interesting what you can find in these.  Beside buttons, you may discover old thimbles, rick rack, measuring tape, hooks and eyes, and lace trim. 

Tangible items which connect us with other creators from another place and another time.  Threads of the past which still stitch us together as the people we are today.  Just like old quilts, we can hold these relics in our hands and wonder who had them, where did they come from, and how were they used.  We marvel at both their beauty and their prosaic status as an everyday item.  And in some way, these buttons fasten a comforting thought:  No matter how much things change, it’s good to know that there are things that don’t. 

Buttons are one of those things.

Until Next Week, From My Studio to Yours,

Love and Stitches,

Sherri and Felix.

PS – If you decide to use buttons on your quilt, be sure to add them after the quilt is quilted. Buttons can be difficult to quilt around.