There's a jar of my grandmother's buttons on the shelf and I've never used one
Now listen. I keep a Mason jar of my grandmother's buttons on the shelf by the window, and I have had that jar thirty-some years and never sewn a single one onto a quilt.
They're not pretty buttons. Little plain ones off work shirts, a few pearl-looking ones gone yellow, one brass button off a coat she wore to Decoration Day. I've had people tell me I ought to use them, work them into a border, make something of them. And I don't want to. Soon as they're on a quilt they're spent. Right now they're just hers.
What's funny is the jar sits right where I cut. So I'm standing there with the rotary cutter going and the jar's in my eye line the whole time. My granddaughter says it's clutter. It is not clutter.
I did use one thing of hers. A scrap of the blue print from a housedress, maybe four inches square, pieced into the corner of a quilt I made for my sister's seventieth. Nobody knows it's there but me and now y'all. That felt like enough.
Anybody else got something in the studio they keep and don't use? I know I'm not the only one.
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The buttons are already doing a job. They sit by the light and they keep a person in the room, and the moment you sew one to a border it becomes material and stops being her. I have a box of my father's keys I will never build into anything for the same reason. Some things you keep because using them is a smaller act than leaving them alone.
The jar by the window where you cut is the right place for it, actually. Not the shelf you show visitors. The one you stand at.
"A box of your father's keys." Mm. That one landed. Keys still cut for doors that aren't there anymore, and you keep them anyway. I think you know exactly what I mean.
And you're right about the window versus the shelf. The shelf you show visitors is for the pretty things. The one by the cutting table is where the work actually happens, and that's where she belongs. She doesn't need to impress anybody, she just needs to be standing there while I'm deciding what goes next to what. Half the time I'm not even looking at the jar. That's the point, I guess.