Craft your own Hat Pins and Buttons

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 18th September 1912, page 41.

To end the instructions were these musings:

‘As this is an era of buttons, and “five hundred” not too many for a gown, it seems to almost exhaust the ingenuity of manufacturers to provide a variety to correspond with the demand. The individual worker, that can add to what is in the market, by using her own fingers and skill in copying or originating, is to be congratulated.

‘We quote from a recent periodical the following: “Buttons have been so much in request this season for decorative as well as merely useful purposes that button factories have been working overtime and have found it difficult to meet the demand. Paris has commanded the use of buttons, and the fashionable world has hastened to comply.”

When we take up the study of buttons it may lead us afar. Our dusky sister on the west coast of Africa has a fancy for buttons that is not to be surpassed by the Parisian sister. The ordinary shirt button of civilisation are so attractive in her eyes that she decorates, not her gown, but her hair with dozens and dozens of them, whole cards being fastened above each ear.

Many a useful idea in production of new varieties of buttons could be obtained if it were possible to “restore” some of the old-time button charms or strings. Who does not remember them? When a button was begged from from every friend the little girl possessed, and added to the already yard-long string. What envy the girl with the longest string provoked! How often they must be restrung upon a fresh string! – and how treasured was each quaint addition to her store!”

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