Friday, September 27, 2013

Cute as a Garter Button

Frippery du jour over here at quaintrelle towers (ok duplex) is garter buttons! You probably know the things I mean... Little silk covered buttons printed or painted with sultry eyed flapper faces from  the 1920's.

New styles and new hosiery had lead to girls rolling their stockings and holding them tightly in place with either rubber like bands or adventurous garters. Above the knee if you wanted to play it safe or bellow the knee if you were feeling sexy and wanted to let your knees do the taking! Fashionable girls could display their modern and irreverent attitudes with these flirty faces peeking out from under
rising hemlines.

Created by the ribbon companies at the time, they seem to have been printed on long ribbons, then cut and shaped into various whimsical buttons. Some were left simply as printed faces, some adorned with further ribbons and frills, and others went further with cheeky sayings like "You'd be surprised" or my personal favorite, a police man proclaiming "Stop go no further!"

Not wholly found on garters, they could also be seen on other flirty items such as powder puffs, and mirrors, all the various ribbon covered items in a true coquette's  arsenal!

You can often find them for sale on places like easy or ebay, but as a girl who likes ribbons it seemed like a fun thing to make from scratch. 
Currently still just buttons here are a few of the faces to come off my work bench this week....

Their destinies will be another post later on, but for now, anyone else wanting to say it with buttons might want to check out the quick tutorial over on the Quaintrelle Life website and make some too! 

What do you think your knees might want to say?

2 comments:

  1. These are just precious! I want to give this a try, but I'm not sure I understand how these little darlings attach to the garment... Help?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Back on the day they had little pins on the back kinda like a tie tack or a brooch, the one made like in the tutorial though end up like a button you can just sew on through the loop in the back. You could probably glue a brooch pin onto them though if you wanted to make them detachable?

      Delete

 

Based on layout and code by Lena