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  When most people think about polyester, they think of the 1970s and the 1980s – shiny, synthetic jackets stretched tight, tucked into stretchy, polyester bellbottoms in bright colors, or flashdance-esque polyester leggings and oversized, baggy polyester shirts. Luckily, over the past forty years polyester, like all fabrics, has improved, and now there’s key advantages to buying fabrics made from a synthetic fabric, or a combination of synthetics and natural fibers. Polyester fabrics – knitted from polyester yarns – can be natural or synthetic in origin. Invented in 1941 in England based on earlier research, early polyester was formed through...

     I once had a boss that I despised. The man was awful and that's not an opinion, it's a fact. Yet, when I had my one and only shot to make his life a little less pleasant, I didn't take it. It occurred one afternoon when a colleague made a mistake on materials that went out to a client. My boss uttered the following words, “I'm going to hunt that b****rd down” and immediately, I knew that I had my opportunity to strike. Bad language was perfectly acceptable in the workplace, but the “hunting down” part, if...

Ties... Some of us choose to wear them. Some of us are required to wear them. Most of us don't wear them at all. Some of us love them. Some of us hate them. Most of us don't care about them. Interestingly, for a word that suggests universality, “ties,” people's opinions of them are anything but universal. Furthermore, ties are an everyday part of some people's lives but don't play any role in others' lives. One could even go so far as to say that the ties more often untie than tie. But even though ties aren't universal, there is...

  Philly has its cheesesteaks; Chicago has its deep dish pizza; and Waterbury, Connecticut has its buttons. Yup, buttons. And while they are not as tasty as cheesesteaks or deep dish pizza (in fact, to be clear, we DO NOT recommend eating buttons), the Waterbury Button, and the Waterbury Button Company as a whole, is pretty darn special. The Waterbury Button Company is the oldest metal button manufacturer in the United States. The Company was founded in 1812 when the United States went to war with Britain, the U.S.'s exclusive supplier of buttons prior to war. As a result of...