Good afternoon, and thank you for stopping by. My name is Norma Reavis. I am seventy-seven years old, I was a telephone operator for thirty-one years, and I have been collecting buttons since 1952, when my mother's button tin came to me. My grandson Jared is typing this for me, because I can say a great deal more in an afternoon than I could ever type with two fingers. He has asked me to tell you he is very fast.

Every button in my collection came off something somebody wore, and somebody sewed it on, and somebody kept it when the dress or the coat wore out. So every one of them has a story, even when I don't know what it is. Here are some of the ones I do know.

My mother, Annie, kept her buttons in a round blue tin that had held Christmas candy sometime before I was born. It sat on the shelf over her sewing machine my whole childhood. When I was small and sick in bed, she would bring me the tin and a shoe box lid, and I would pour the buttons into the lid and sort them by color, then by size, then by how pretty they were, for hours. That was the best medicine in our house.

Nothing was ever thrown away in those days. When a dress or a shirt was finished, Mother cut the buttons off before the cloth went to the rag bag, and they went in the tin. So that tin held forty years of our family's clothes: my father's work shirts, my grandmother's good dress, my brothers' Sunday knickers, my own baby coat.

Mother passed away in the spring of 1952. When my sister-in-law and I were going through her things, I found the tin on the same shelf, and I sat down on the floor with it and cried, and then I poured it into a shoe box lid and sorted it, the way I used to. I've been adding to it ever since. The tin is still on my shelf. It holds only her buttons. Everything else lives in the cabinet Bernard built me in 1963, with forty-two shallow drawers, which is now full, which is a problem we'll get to.

Button people sort by what a button is made of and how it was made. Here are the kinds I love best, laid out the way I'd lay them out on a tray at a show. Jared made the tray out of a table. I think he did a nice job.

1. Mother's coat buttons. Six black glass buttons, cut in facets so they sparkle, from my mother's good winter coat, the one she wore to church for fifteen years. She cut them off when the coat finally gave out, around 1937, and strung them on a piece of red thread so they'd stay together in the tin. They're still on that red thread. I have never untied it, and I never will.

2. The calico that started it all. In 1961 I went to a farm auction with Bernard, who was after a set of tools, and I bought a sewing basket in a box lot for a quarter. In the bottom, under the thread, was a button no bigger than a pea: white china, printed with tiny blue flowers. I didn't know what it was. I took it to the library, and a book told me, and that was the day I stopped being a woman with a button tin and became a button collector. I now have three hundred and some calicoes. That little blue one is still the best.

3. The fox and the grapes. A brass picture button, about an inch and a quarter, with the fox from the old fable sitting under the grapevine looking up. I bought it at a flea market in 1974 from an old gentleman who said it came off his grandmother's cape. He wanted three dollars. I had two dollars and forty cents. He took the two-forty and said his grandmother would have liked me. I think of him every time I take it out.

4. My dancing dress. Seven cherry-red Bakelite buttons, round as gumdrops, from the dress I made myself in the spring of 1946 for a dance at the Grange hall. I was twenty-four and working the switchboard, and I had saved for the fabric for a month. Which brings me to the next button.

5. Bernard's anchor button. At that same dance there was a tall young man home from the Navy in his peacoat, and one of his buttons was hanging by a thread. I said, "I have a needle in my purse," which I did, and always have. I sewed that button back on in the cloakroom. We were married in 1947. Bernard passed away in 1991, and when I gave his old peacoat to the church drive, I kept the buttons. It's a plain black button with an anchor on it, worth about a dime to anybody else, and it is the most valuable thing I own.

• Start at home. Ask your mother, your aunts and your grandmothers if they have a button tin or a jar. Most women my age do, and most of them would be tickled that somebody wants to look.
• Garage sales and rummage sales. Look for sewing baskets, old cookie tins and jars of buttons. They're often a dollar or less, and nobody has looked through them.
• Auctions and estate sales. Box lots of sewing things go for very little. You may have to buy a box of crochet hooks and a broken lamp to get the buttons. It's worth it.
• Get a magnifying glass. Half the fun is in the little details you can't see with your plain eyes, especially past seventy.
• Pick a kind you love and learn it well, then branch out. Don't try to learn everything at once.
• Go to the library. There are good books on buttons, with pictures, and the librarian will find them for you.
• Join a button club. There are clubs in a good many states, and the people are the kindest you'll ever meet. They will happily spend an hour telling you about a single button.
• Don't clean anything until you know what it is. See my page on cleaning (and not cleaning). I learned that one the hard way.

Our state button society's fall show is Saturday, October 16, in Columbus. There will be dealers' tables, a lunch, and the competition, where members bring their buttons mounted on trays to be judged by kind. This year I'm entering a tray of calicoes, and I've been working on it at the kitchen table since August. Jared says I move them a quarter of an inch and then stare at them for ten minutes, and he's not wrong.

My friend Jeanne Gould from our button club is driving, because I don't drive on the highway anymore and Jeanne drives like she's being chased. If you're coming, look for two old ladies at the calico table, arguing in a friendly way. That will be us. Come say hello. And bring your grandmother's tin. Somebody there will know what's in it.

If you like old things from a lady's closet, Jared also found me a lovely page called Vintage Hats & How to Wear Them, about hats of the 1920s through the 1960s. I wore most of those hats. I still have two of them.