Rainy Day Button Box

I can still see my mother's button box. It was tin, with embossed figures of old-fashioned ladies and gentleman outlined in red all around it. One of my favorite things to do was to empty it out on the table finding all the fun and unusual ones, and sorting the rest into empty egg cartons or muffin tins. Sometimes I sorted by color, sometimes by size or the number of holes. I had favorite buttons too - the little green pearled buttons from a long-ago sweater set, the big flat glossy purple one, the ones that looked like leather or wood, and the ones from my grandpa's navy uniforms with little anchors on them.

A button box is the perfect rainy day activity for kids, especially if you forget about it for awhile and then bring it out on a day when nothing much is going on. In my button box, I have some large needles, thread, and a couple of old dish towels, and the kids have had fun sewing buttons onto the towels. They can also use the thread to string buttons into a necklace, or to make a button spinner toy. There's just no end to the fun a simple button box can provide, except the kids sometimes have to move me away from the buttons and stop me from sorting them.