pigeon gillian: Buttons Galore!

A few years ago my dad gave me a big box of buttons. He used to have his blacksmith workshop in a skip yard in Scotland and every so often a skip full of random stuff would come into the yard. Sometimes it would be a skip from a house clearance, perhaps after someone has died or moved house, or sometimes from shops. One year all our family got Calvin Klein perfume for Christmas after dad found a massive pile of the stuff in a skip! The boxes had been damaged so the shop couldn't sell them. Bonus for us! Anyway, back to the point....the box of buttons. I've had this box for years now and I shipped it to Australia with us because I knew it was too good to throw out. This week I decided to start sorting through it and sort the buttons into colours. Not only were there buttons, there were all sorts of habidashery and little clues about the previous owner. I found an envelop addressed to 'Mr I Kilgour' and a fabric name tag which reads 'Margaret Kilgour'. The envelope has an Edinburgh address and a post mark date of 1989.

I suppose some people might think it a bit mean to be going through someone else's belongings in such a way, but I don't. These treasures would have been thrown to land fill if dad hadn't found them and passed them on to me. I love thinking about the Kilgours and about the amount of years that they had been collecting these buttons. There are some very old looking ones in here....