Weskit

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Pictured, my little mini-project for the day: finally putting some replacement buttons on my [very] old corduroy weskit [waistcoat], a garment I've owned for fifty years and which was already several decades old when I bought it from a jumble sale in the early 1970s. It used to have buttons with pictures of hunting scenes in them, but all perished over the years, and it remained buttonless for a very long time. I dug the thing out of the depths of a cupboard this summer, and was about to bin it when I decided I really didn't want to part with it; so I put it through the wash - it was pretty filthy - and put it back into storage.

Today I thought I might put some fresh buttons on it - no idea what prompted the idea - so I fished around in the big tin of buttons we have and found half-a-dozen matching brown buttons of the right size. I elected to use a contrasting orange thread to sew them on, just for fun. Although you can't really see that contrast in the picture, it turned out fine; so I'll continue to wear the thing into the foreseeable future: a garment that has well more than paid the ecological dues of its manufacture. And you simply can't get corduroy of this quality any more. BTW, the silver watch chain was my paternal grandmother's, and it is attached to one of my old WWII service pocket watches...

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