My Mother's Buttons

by Ruth Jacobson
August 2002

My mother, Mom to us, Gram to all her grandchildren, loved buttons. She always seemed to find an interesting new way to use them, and loved finding unusual buttons.

Knowing how much she enjoyed them, I took her to a national button show in the Tacoma Exhibition Hall some years ago, where many button enthusiasts displayed their beautiful collections. After we'd spent what seemed to me to be more than enough time at the first exhibit, I said, "Mom, let's look at some of the other button displays." But she stayed bent over a bin of loose buttons for sale, sifting through them, looking for that perfect button. "Honey, first come and look at this one. Wouldn't it make an attractive pin?"

I finally pried her away from her button bin, and we strolled on through the Exhibition Hall, inspecting the many button collections, or rather, I did most of the looking, because when I'd turn around there Mom would be, delightedly sifting in one more bin of buttons. She didn't want to miss a single special button. I'm sure she already had an idea of what she wanted to do with every one she found.

My mother came to live with my husband, Harold, and me just after her 102nd birthday. Until then she had lived in her own apartment. We thought she was coping well on her own. She baked her own bread, walked the two blocks to her church every Sunday, and along with a few friends, sewed baby quilts for a pregnancy aid group. However, she was beginning to appear more frail, and her eyesight had failed much more than any of us realized. After she caused a small fire in her apartment while she was baking bread, it was evident that she couldn't safely live alone any longer. So, Mom moved in with us, bringing her quilt-making supplies, bread-making equipment, and thousands of buttons.

The timing of her move was fortunate, because within a few months, Mom suffered a minor stroke that left her even more physically dependent. This misfortune, along with her diminished eyesight severely limited her choices of how to spend her time.

Finding suitable and enjoyable activities for her became one of my major challenges. Mom had to be busy. She couldn't tolerate being idle. When she used to come to visit, her usual greeting was, "Now give me something to do. I can't just sit around, I love to work."

All her life, Mom had explored and enjoyed a variety of handcrafts. Besides the baby quilts and lap robes that she and her friends had sewed for more than 25 years, at one time or another she had made handmade paper and unusual Christmas decorations and done tin craft and bead work. She had made porcelain dolls until she couldn't see well enough to paint their faces, created cute little dolls from chicken wishbones, and restored and dressed old dolls for an Orthopedic group. She had never cared for knitting and crocheting, and now her worsening vision wouldn't allow her to continue sewing baby quilts or watch television. In addition to these handicaps, her increasing deafness eliminated the enjoyment of listening to talking books or the radio.

Then a wonderful thing happened, and Mom's purpose in life for the next five years unfolded. She came up with the idea of making button-decorated pillows. Now, she could combine her fascination with buttons and her desire to be doing something worthwhile and creative.

She still helped me by folding laundry, cleaning vegetables and berries, and other small tasks, which allowed her to continue to feel useful, but her button project was her principal joy. When she lit on making these intriguing little pillows, she had found a new lease on life. And an added bonus was that she already had boxes and tins and bags of buttons, buttons of every size and description just waiting to be put to some interesting use.

Mom had always used her buttons in clever ways. Once she decorated her lampshades with them. She covered the frames of her floor lamps with muslin and sewed on buttons in geometric designs and all around the top and bottom borders. She sewed a muslin shade for her small bedside lamp, as well, which she completely covered with small, white pearl buttons. She told me there were 1004 buttons on the shade. "Mom, how can you be sure of that number?" I asked. She told me she would scoop a teaspoon of buttons into a sauce dish, count them, write down the number, and sew them on. She continued in this way until the entire shade was covered. These lampshades are now family treasures.

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One time I asked her about her philosophy of life. She thought about it a bit, and replied, "Always have a plan. Then stick to your plan." Before Mom came to live with us, she had saved quite a bunch of lacy white buttons for a long time, always planning to sew them on the collar of a dress. One day, when we were looking through a fabric store, we saw just the right material for the dress she had in mind-a print in lavender, which was her favorite color. We also found some white fabric for the collar. She knew exactly what the dress should look like.

I made the dress, cutting a pattern for the collar she planned, and she sewed on the buttons, double rows on the two pockets, on the cuffs of the long sleeves, which she wanted pointed, and all around the collar-201 buttons-all exactly alike. She loved her "button dress" and enjoyed wearing it so much.

Periodically, Mom had made pins out of unusual buttons. One beautiful large, pearl-like button became a pin that she wore at the neck of her button dress.

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Pam, her first care giver, was the one who started Mom on her career as the "button pillow lady." The first Christmas Mom was with us Pam gave her a pillow that she had made. On the small, dark blue pillow, about 10x12 inches, Pam had sewn a big heart full of colorful buttons. As a lover of buttons, Mom was impressed not only with the gift, but also with the idea. "I could do that," she said with enthusiasm. Making button pillows was something she could enjoy doing and no longer be forced into idleness and boredom or be dependent on someone else for diversion. This is not to say that she was totally independent. She continued to need some assistance with threading her needles, tracing the heart design on the pillow fabric, shopping for fabric, or searching for more buttons in second-hand stores and antique shops from Seattle to San Francisco. Making button pillows not only combined Mom's fascination with buttons and her desire to create something attractive, it also fit within her physical and visual capabilities. She could again be able to make plans and carry them through and in a small way be in control of her life. After Pam stitched the outline of the design, usually a large, fat heart, on the fabric with heavy, white thread, Mom could proceed by feeling those stitches. She outlined the heart with white buttons and then filled the rest of the heart with an array of colored buttons. Sometimes she might ask about button colors, but she was usually on her own as she set to work each day, rummaging through a small box of buttons that she liked to keep on her lap, feeling each button as she selected the next one to sew on the fabric.

Mom always planned her work from day to day. More often than not, she chose the buttons she planned to use the next day, placing them in her small, working box, ready for her to start right to work the next morning. Before she began a new pillow, she sorted through her various stashes of buttons, picking out the special ones to include and transferring the selection to her daily working box. Visualizing how she wanted her finished product to look was an especially enjoyable part of her work.

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One of the wonderful things about her button work was the pleasure and enjoyment it gave to so many other people and how it widened Mom's social contacts. It was remarkable how many people shared her interest in buttons and enjoyed coming to visit with her and talk about them. No matter who came to the house, it seemed that nearly everyone, men and women alike, had a story to tell about playing with the buttons in their mother's or their grandmother's button box when they were kids. Before they left, Mom seldom failed to ask, "Do you have any buttons? I need more buttons." And frequently, she'd add, "You can just call me a button-brain."

People were so generous. They sent her buttons from Seattle to San Francisco and even Hong Kong. One of the highlights of Mom's day was the arrival of a box of buttons in the mail. She would pore over the exciting collection, marveling that she found so few duplicates. Every button was like a small jewel to her, and as she looked at all of them she started to plan just what she wanted to do with each one. So many times she'd say, "Oh, come see this one. I know just where I'm going to put it." She had numerous small boxes and jars in her bedroom cabinet for special buttons, and she always told us in which box we should put her select specimens. She always seemed to know what she had stored away when the appropriate need for it arose.

Once William, one of her grandsons, sent her a wonderful collection of unusual buttons from Hong Kong, and she spent hours happily sorting through them, planning how she would use them and just whose pillow certain ones would grace.

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She knew exactly who would receive the pillow she was working on, designing them to fit each person, whether it was a new baby, a special grandchild, or her pastors. For her pastors, Mom designed pillows with a heart bordered with gold buttons and three crosses in the center made of similar gold buttons. She filled the rest of the heart with white pearl buttons. When she received news that a great-grandchild was expected, she immediately planned a small pillow made of pale pink fabric. On it, she sewed a curving row of tiny, blue, bunny-shaped buttons. Another time she made a pillow for her granddaughter Vikki's friend Ailene, who happened to be Jewish. On the pillow she outlined a Star of David with gold buttons and filled the star with white buttons.

We mailed dozens of pillows to people in many different states and to Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Hong Kong. Before pillows were given away, we stitched a small muslin patch on the back of each one on which we printed in permanent ink, "Made by Signa Hanson," her age, and the current date. Mom helped wrap each one in tissue paper and tied it with a ribbon before it was done up in brown wrapping paper.

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Pam was indispensable in the button pillow projects. She cut pillow fabric, helped sort buttons, and traced and stitched the heart design on the fabric. She managed all the wrapping and mailing, kept a record of all the pillows, listing those given and those sold, and how much money Mom made when she sold one.

By her 106th birthday, when Mom had given a pillow to everyone in her large family (which meant five generations, by then) and to many of her friends, she started to sell some of her creations.

Her "pillow business" began when her dentist remarked that she would like to buy one of her pillows. Mom replied, "Well, I'm not going to sell them for just $5." Kathy, one of her granddaughters, told her she should ask at least $25 for each one. Mom liked that idea, and her pillow business was launched. During that year, the proceeds from her pillow sales were over $500. We often wondered how many women at 106 years of age could start their own business.

Mom's buttons were with her to the end. Even in her last days in the hospital, she asked us to bring the pillow she had been working on, hoping, but unable, to finish it. She died 19 days before her 107th birthday. She had made 106 pillows, one for each year of her life.

Some months earlier she had told me what we should do with all the buttons she wouldn't be able to use. We were to divide them between her daughter Ellen, granddaughter Kathy, and her beloved Pam. All were button lovers too, and like Mom, they knew exactly what they would do with each button.