Wasn't there once a game about "Button, button, who's got the button?"
With Eunice Farmer Fabrics closed, I no longer know where to go to find beautiful buttons. I used to go there the way other people go to a jewelry store; I'd reverently slide buttons out of their clear plastic cylinders and hold them in my palm so they caught the light. Many were jewel-bright, rhinestone or sparkly colored glass, and then there were the jet ones that reminded me of my glamorous Great-Aunt Mary, with her blonde bun and snazzy cardigans, and the carved wood ones that brought back my teenage latigo-purse embroidered-jeans years, and the shimmery mother-of-pearl ones that belonged on a mermaid. Often, the buttons gave me sticker shock--I once plucked out a button the size of a dime and found out it cost $12. But I learned to sort through, as one does with buttons, and figure out just how much transformation I could afford.
Now where do I go?
I've sewn those Eunice Farmer buttons on pillows and curtain tabs and thrift-shop vintage dresses from Saks in New York. I've sliced off the thread-holder bumps with power tools and glued the flat discs to earring backs or wooden boxes. Buttons are finishing touches, tiny instances of perfection. They tie things together, give us closure. As a kid, I'd comb through my grandmother's button jar and trunk of fabric scraps on rainy afternoons, dizzy with somebody else's memories. Now, I go to lesser stores and see cheap buttons wired to cardboard rectangles, strangling as people spin their racks. It makes me want to cry.
I'm as thrifty as the next person, these days. But the details it's easiest to neglect are the details that make the difference.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
