Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Button Wednesday : Mother of Pearl


It is Wednesday again, so it's BUTTON DAY on my blog !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I came across the following picture on Flickr; it's a giant button made of tiny mother of pearl buttons.

Looking further I found out that it was part of an exhibition about 100 years of mother of pearl production in Austria (Stift Geras 2009). I had no idea that there was such a thing as a mother of pearl industry in Austria, a country without any sea coast .... 


The production started with shells from the rivers Thaya and March, which were gathered in great quantities by the farmers when straightening brooks. The shell meat was given to the Swine, and the shells were made into buttons and other decorations.




(all pictures from weisserstier)


They had also the old and new production machines in the exhibition. How I wish I had known about this exhibition in time. I would love to see how these buttons were made ! But I found out that I can visit the fabric, so I plan a trip to Austria :)








(all pictures from weisserstier)



Have you seen a lovely, beautiful, stunning, crazy button or button-related thingy, or did you make something with a button / buttons, or did you even make buttons yourself, blog about it on your blog on Wednesday, and give the link here in the comments so that everybody can enjoy it !!

3 comments:

Bigbluebed said...

That is so interesting. The big button is beautiful and so is the factory. I always feel a bit odd about new mother of pearl buttons, but vintage ones are lovely and it is good that the 'meat' was eaten too.

For my Button Wednesday blog visit here http://bigbluebed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/gold-medal-aka-giant-button.html

Joanne said...

Love reading your button posts, always so interesting!

X by Leina Neima said...

I used to love those shiny small mother of pearl buttons as a child... So exiting post again....