NEW HAVEN — On Tuesday, Verd Mont Button Club member Sheri Ross, 73, enthusiastically showed off a collection of small, big and beautiful buttons displayed on pillows that the Verd Mont Button Club stand in the Home and Garden Barn at this year’s Addison County Fair & Field Days. 

Button collectors and enthusiasts from across the state have been connecting through the club, which has been dedicated to the niche hobby since 1979. 

From March to November, members gather monthly to compare notes — and of course buttons. 

“The Verd Mont Button Club was founded … in order to bring into a relation of mutual helpfulness and cooperation, organizations and persons who pursue the hobby of collecting buttons, to promote educational exhibitions, to encourage research, to publish and disseminate information among its members, and to preserve for the future generations all that is beautiful and historical in buttons,” explains a club pamphlet. 

Things can even get competitive. 

“Club members participate in national and regional button shows and conventions sponsored by the Northeast Regional Button Association and the National Button Society,” the pamphlet reads. 

Ross, who still has a hint of a Southern accent, said she began collecting when she was 19 years old. 

“I just went to the flea market in Nashville a lot and yard sales. I went to auctions every Saturday with my mom. And I just loved them,” she said. 

Ross pointed out pillows festooned with two types of “realistic” glass buttons, of which she said her personal favorite resembles the same creature printed all across her shirt — frogs.