I sewed all my life and had my own collection of buttons. When my mother died, I kept her buttons and then, when my aunt died, I found she'd kept my grandmother's AND my grt grandmother's collection of buttons. What treasures! Since I have only one child to pass this on to and wanted to combine them somehow without actually mixing them, I took a large canning jar and filled it with buttons in layers, a note between each layer. I barely had room for all of them. The jar was one from my grt grandfather's canning jar company so that added even more meaning. We bought a screw-on lamp kit and now it sets on my mother's old treadle sewing machine which we use as a phone table.