Oh How Charming!
The House suspects that many of this blog’s dear readers succumb to the compulsion — at least from time to time — of collecting and displaying little bits and bobs. You know — an interesting shell, a fragment of pottery, a thimble, a tiny doll, a found earring… that sort of thing.
Maybe arranged in a shadowbox, tucked away in a cigar box, or even sewn onto a vest?
What a pleasure it is to behold these little collections!
A collection of tiny, intriguing objects, The House of Good Fortune Collection
Which brings us to the topic of today’s post… one specific way of displaying one’s trinket collection — the charm string.
Kudos to Cincinnati Magazine for bringing this lovely old tradition to The House’s attention.
The article explains a practice common among young women in the late 19th century of stringing together a collection of intriguing objects that would function as a talisman of sorts.
While the general practice of collecting power objects actually dates back thousands of years, this post explores the specific 19th century expression, which evolved during the Victorian era into the collection of unique buttons.
Each button had to be collected or traded, not purchased. The goal was for a young woman to compile a collection of 999 buttons, with the 1,000th button to be provided by her true love. As a corollary, a young woman who had collected 1,000 buttons on her own would be “doomed to spinsterhood.” (Bah!)
As someone who has recently inherited her mother-in-law’s collection of old buttons, The House intends to begin working on a charm string stat!