Buttons, buttons, everywhere
My eldest daughter asked me to make a white work shirt for her that had a collar and buttons down the front. So I completed said task and came to the final step of making the buttonholes and sewing on the buttons.
At this point I looked in my button collection to see if I had nine matching buttons to use that would suit the shirt and of course the answer was “No”. So I decided to use 9 completely different buttons rather than going out and purchasing 9 matching buttons…after all Revival Works likes to Reduce.Reuse.Revival!
That got me thinking about buttons in general, and the eco friendly trends that we try to apply to everything today. It turns out that there is a large variety of eco sustainable / natural / recycled / responsibly harvested (and the list goes on) buttons available for purchase rather than the standard plastic ones that we have long been used to using.
There are Corozo buttons made from the nut of the Tagua Palm which mainly grows in South America. The tree is unharmed and keeps growing and producing the nuts for up to 100 years and no toxic ingredients or chemicals are used or produced in the making of the clothing buttons.
There also eco sustainable buttons available made from recycled cotton hemp and recycled polyester…recycled glass…Fairtrade…Wood…Coconut…Bamboo…Rafia…and responsibly harvested Mother of Pearl to name a few. So with little searching it seems that there are many options available to us for a better choice than new plastic buttons.
Of course the one that is not included in my list is what I chose to do with my daughter’s shirt. I used buttons from my “stash”…most if not all are plastic buttons that have been around for many many years, cut off from old unusable garments destined for the rag pile, or bought from thrift shops / vintage shops and reused on a new garment. And that in itself is a great use of the old environmentally “unfriendly” humble plastic button I feel! So save your old buttons!
You may wonder how my daughter liked her mismatched button shirt? She Loved it! She also likes to be slightly different to everyone else, so her new white shirt is just that…slightly different!
I’ll finish with the best button joke I could find for you?!…
I was really scared when I started learning to fly. I looked down nervously and said: “What are all these buttons for?”
The pilot said: “They keep your shirt closed.”
Love Your Clothes Longer
Kirsten