Buttons are useful, decorative, sentimental, collectable, fun … and they cover a multitude of sins when upcycling.

In a long-ago Sunday Mail magazine article (23 November 1997), I wrote about the magic buttons and the stamp of individuality they bring to garments. The story included a north Queensland grazier who was making buttons from timber on her property to generate income during hard times. The buttons were made by pruning branches from native hardwoods on the Charters Towers property that were 1-2cm in diameter, dry them for weeks to harden the sap, cut them into circles and treat with durable varnish to keep the bark in place and make them washable. My dear departed friend Polly Wilson was editing the magazine at the time and she later left me her button and fabric collection. I’ve included one of Polly’s buttons in today’s upcycle.

I picked up this top at an op shop, it seemed to be brand new but had a few pull marks in the front. I’ve covered these marks with random buttons of similar colour sourced from my extensive button collection. It is amazing how many buttons one can end up with (thousands) when you just gather individually or in bottles and bags as you come across them. I have an old spoon wall display box now sitting flat as a decorative button holder. On closer inspection of the label of this top, I found the garment was made in Bangladesh which made me think of the garment workers who lost their lives in the Rana Plaza collapse last year and it is a concern that work conditions appear not to have improved much since that time, according to this article in UK’s The Telegraph newspaper.

The skirt is a beautiful silk-linen with pleated hemline but was a very big size. To solve the  width problem, I cut a slice out of it and resewed the pieces together again, working up from the hemline so that it still sits neatly. To shorten it, instead of tampering with the hemline I cut off the clunky waistband, neatened the raw edge and turned it inside (including the top of the zip) before threading with thin elastic. The elastic stretches enough to enable the zip to still do its job. The jumper falls over the waistband so this makeshift solution is not on public display.