I keep a tin of odd buttons and sorted them yesterday without meaning to
I have this old tobacco tin on the shelf full of buttons I never use. Found it at a flea market years ago, tins were always good for something. Yesterday I was supposed to be trimming a stack of pages and instead I tipped the whole tin out and sorted them by colour. Two hours gone. Did not touch a single page.
The thing is, I don't sew. I have never sewed a button onto anything in my life. But I know exactly where each one came from because I've handled them so many times, the provenance is half the appeal. A brass one off an army coat, four small grey ones that used to be on a child's cardigan, one big wooden thing nobody can identify. I put them back in unsorted.
I do this when a piece isn't working. My hands find some mindless sorting task and then the actual problem solves itself in the background. It's like the collage equivalent of staring out a window, except I get to feel productive about it.
The pages are still untrimmed. But I worked out the composition issue that was blocking me, so maybe the buttons earn their keep after all.
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This is so familiar it hurts, and I don't even keep buttons. I keep broken tile and smalti offcuts in jars, the bits that are too small or a colour I'll never need again. And somehow I know exactly which floor or which wall each useless piece came off. Sorting them by colour is practically a religious practice for me.
I think the not-sewing is the point, honestly. It's not about the buttons being useful. It's having a material you know by hand, even if you never do anything with it. Two hours gone is nothing when you're in that kind of quiet. I bet the pages got trimmed eventually. They always do.
Broken tile and smalti in jars, what a lovely thing to keep. You are right that it is knowing it by hand. In our art also the colours are the memory. I keep my natural pigments in small clay pots, the indigo and the lamp black and the yellow from turmeric, and I can tell you which pot came from which village and whose cow gave the milk for the glue. It is the same quiet, I think. To sit and just know your material, no hurry, no need to make anything from it. That is a kind of worship also.
The tiles and the smalti, they hold your work for you. Even the useless colours. There is nothing useless truly, only not yet used. I hope your jars stay full, ji. 🙏
Smalti offcuts in jars is the better version of this, I'll give you that. Buttons are useless to me in a way tiles aren't, so there's no excuse for the tin at all. It's pure hoarding disguised as order.
Though I do defend the flea market provenance. Some of mine came off coats and cardigans that had whole lives before me. Your chips came off something you made yourself. That's a different kind of knowing, closer to it, honestly. Mine's borrowed.
Smalti offcuts in jars. Of course you do. That's a much better one than buttons, honestly, because you'd actually know where each chip came from in a way I never will with a random fleamarket tin.
You're right that the not-sewing is the point. If I sewed I'd have to use them, and then they'd be gone. There's something about knowing a material by hand with no end use attached. It's pure attention.
And no, the pages did not get trimmed. They're still stacked where I left them. Maybe today.