Introducing The Button Jar

A Family Secret That Sparked a Story

Every family has a box of secrets. For mine, it was a locked drawer in my grandmother Jewel’s desk. Only late in life did I learn inside were old photos and press clippings of my grandfather’s death. He had taken his own life after years of struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. I never knew him, but I knew the silence that surrounded his absence.

A Seamstress’s Table as a World of Stories

Jewel carried on as a self-made seamstress. Her dining room table was never used for meals. It was a staging ground for fabrics, McCall's sewing patterns, and thread. As a child, I collected her stray spools, bobbins, and buttons and built whole make-believe worlds from them. While she sewed, she shared stories of her family and her childhood. Sometimes lighthearted, sometimes heavy, but always stitched with truth.

Inspiration for The Button Jar

Those memories became the seed of The Button Jar. The story is fiction, but it’s inspired by Jewel: her resilience, her sewing, and the way ordinary objects: buttons, fabric scraps, the contents of a desk drawer can carry an entire life’s worth of memory.

In The Button Jar, a daughter uncovers her late mother’s hidden past through a jar of buttons and a trail of postcards. Each card reveals a piece of the story; sometimes a confession, sometimes a tender memory, sometimes a truth too long buried. The order isn’t chronological. The buttons are numbered by courage, not by time. The result is a story stitched together piece by piece, like a quilt, until the whole truth is revealed.

How PostcardStoryCo Brings Stories to Life

At PostcardStoryCo, we believe stories are more powerful when you can hold them in your hands. That’s why The Button Jar is told across 25 postcards, each pairing a short installment with a visual symbol, an illustrated button, a scrap of fabric, a keepsake. They aren’t travel postcards in the traditional sense. Instead, they’re narrative artifacts, small enough to slip into your palm but layered enough to linger long after the last card.

Honoring a Legacy Through Storytelling

For me, The Button Jar is more than fiction, it’s a way of honoring Jewel, and the way she taught me that stories live in the everyday objects we touch and keep. I hope when you read it, you’ll feel that same intimacy, as if you’ve stumbled upon a family secret tucked in a sewing drawer, waiting to be found.