Design @ Dolley is launching a new partner program, PRESENTS, which highlights a local artist who will share insights into their craft, followed by a hands-on workshop.

The Wonderful World of Buttons

Join us as MaryAnn Chung educates us on the history of buttons during National Button Week!
Following the lecture, Maryann will lead us in 3 different crafts that involve those buttons that you have stashed away for a rainy day. If you do not have buttons, do not worry, we will have some spare just for you.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own buttons/ storage containers if owned and blank picture frames.

MaryAnn Chung is a native of Wisconsin, land of beautiful country, cheese, paper and the Green Bay Packers!  Her first art lessons were from a professor teaching art through a radio perched high on a shelf on the back wall of Valley Brook School.   This one-room country schoolhouse was the setting for more or less 30 students each year, grades 1-8.  It closed its doors for the last time in 1958.

Wisconsin to Virginia offered a path of rich experiences in Arizona, California, Washington DC, Maryland and Tennessee.  MaryAnn earned education degrees in Arizona, Washington DC and Tennessee. She used all years of her education to serve the Fairfax County Public Schools, in a variety of capacities, for 32+ years.  Currently she is a juried member of the Northern Virginia Handcrafter’s Guild and of the National Button Society.  She participates in many of the local arts and crafts shows and she also does commissioned assignments.

In retirement while visiting in Wisconsin MaryAnn claimed her mother’s old French Coffee tin which held the family buttons.  Her sister gave her 2 old salters residing in the recesses of an old dish drawer.  She took them to her brother’s kitchen table and it is there that miniature boxes were born!  A few years later while passing through a small area in Canada, she saw a town sign for the area named Buttonville.  Instantly she knew she had found the name for her studio.

The Buttonville Studio now includes a greatly expanded button collection including several collector’s collections of buttons from the 1800’s to vintage celluloids, pearls, metals, glass, wood , bone, chinas, stencils and much more.  The salters include pressed and cut glass and crystal and some are signed.  There are a few Depression glass era salters but the majority date from the late 1800’s – early 1900’s.  Each represents a bit of preserved history once again serving in a functional form.

To learn more about the vast nature of buttons, please visit National Button Society | National Button Society.