Buttons: The Old, the New, and the Bizarre

Well, you can't really tell it's me in here, unless you know me REALLY well, lol and I just wanted to feature the buttons on this silk jacket so there's no face on this pic.  The big blue button is a triangular type that I made several of in March and April.  The brown ones were made by a friend from Victoria.  They are lucious brown and black ones with an 'animal' feel to them.  Even though the brown and blue buttons weren't made together, I liked the way they seemed to fit on the jacket.  I got the jacket a while back and didn't like the original buttons or the fit of it, so I 'altered' it to make it a little more wearable. 

The brown and black buttons were made for a button swap that I hosted for the Clayamies' group in 2002.  Talk about keeping them for a long time! I did not want to discard/lose them and at the time, did think they'd be used eventually on something and here it is ten years later and WALLA!

Probably there are about a dozen or so more folks out there who have buttons similar to these brown ones.  I wonder what we all did with them?  If you were in that Button Swap a decade ago, you might like to know that I still have an original copy of Polymer Cafe, where the buttons were pictured in an article that I wrote.  Unfortunately, it's been handled a lot, as it has been with me ever since I got the copy.  Silly me...now it's a collector's item but since I didn't keep it in "pristine" condition it is only valuable to me as a keepsake.  I would NEVER part with it.  Some things just are meant to be keepsakes. I hope Liz didn't mind my sharing her buttons with you! Thanks Liz.

Speaking of keepsakes and things "remembered",  this week will be a big family get together with much of our family.  My cousins will be arriving from California and Arizona to celebrate their father's induction into our Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame.  He was a pitcher with semi-pro clubs here and also in some other leagues, before the Goldeyes, our current local team, was established.  There is going to be a ceremony next Saturday inducting him into the hall of fame, along with a banquet that the entire family will be attending.  The next day, there will be an announcement of his (and others') induction into the Hall at the Sunday afternoon Goldeye's Game where we'll also be.

 

The world is small and crazy.  It turns out the the present 'head' of the Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame grew up only two blocks away from me in and was in my class from Grade Four until we graduated from Grade 12, except for Grade 8 when we were put into all-girls or all-boys classes. I remember sitting across from him in Grade 11 Chemistry Class.  I knew he was a sports fanatic even then, but I think baseball was his favourite sport.  On the side of his text book, in ballpoint ben was written:  Al Kaline.  Now, who's to say if that was the baseball player of the day or a play on words of the group of chemicals called alkaline's which we happened to be studying that year. And by the way, he too went on to become a teacher.  I wonder what he would have said to his students in later years if they had been caught writing on the outside pages of THEIR textbooks, lol.