My Adventures with a Button Club . . . .
Since I've written a novel entitled The Button Collector, at some point I figured out that it wouldn't be such a bad idea for me to learn a little bit about button collecting. This became especially apparent when people started contacting me with their button collecting questions! At first I did some research through books and the internet, but eventually I was invited to a real live meeting of a real live button club. Woo Hoo! Of course, I went. The particular meeting I attended was with the Western North Carolina Button Club. It started with our hostess wowing us with her collection of 19th-Century Mandarin hat buttons, but I was also quite impressed by many other buttons the members passed around--the Victorian button nails used to hang pictures, the mourning buttons made of hair, the smugglers' buttons . . . and many more I can't remember. Mandarin hat buttons I also learned about the state and national competitions the club members had entered over t