Art Deco Buttons

With just a week or so  to go till the exhibition ended, I finally made it down to the Hutt Valley to the Dowse Art Museum to view the Art Deco Button Exhibition.   Drawn from Ruth Meier’s  fabulous collection, this exhibition show cases some of her special Art Deco beauties.  Art Deco began in the Roaring Twenties,  through to the share market crash of 1929 and the financial depression of the 1930s.

The rather subdued lighting made it essential to get up close the the wall cabinets at see what was on show.  I preferred the floor cabinets with their different categories well set out.

English Glass buttons

French buttons

For dog lovers

Cheeky Silk Garter buttons

I have heard Ruth speak about her button collection previously, and she always happy for crafters to look through the cards and cards of buttons she brought along to illustrate her talk.  Most of the buttons were bought one at a time, painstakingly building up the collection over 40 years. However once she acquired 700 kilos of buttons in a single purchase, requiring Ruth and her husband to hire a truck and drive through Switzerland in a snowstorm to retrieve hundreds of buttons stored in old tea chests. Her collection started when she purchased a small Oxo tin filled with buttons at an antiques fair in Manchester. They intrigued her and from that moment, as she describes, “it was like a love affair and I couldn’t stop”.