Button Making Can Be Fun and Possibly Profitable for the Whole Family

Several years ago my father, who loved to hang out at flea markets suddenly decided he was going to go into the button-making business. You know the kind of buttons I mean-the big round ones with pictures or comments ranging from cute and funny to religious, political and insulting.

He had so much fun with the button-making kit he ordered, and actually made money selling them at each flea market he attended, that I decided I had to have one, too.

Although I didn't actually try selling my buttons, I enjoy turning out unique buttons for my Sunday school class, my kids, and for various worthy causes. When my husband had by-pass surgery, we designed a button showing a cat hanging from a limb. On the front of the cat, we superimposed the image of a partially closed zipper, and under the design, we put the words, "Zipper-Chest Club."

My husband wore the button proudly and carried a few spares in his pocket to hand out to people he met who had also had open heart surgery, including one of the nurses who had cared for him at the hospital. They often joked about being members of the Zipper-Chest Club when they ran into each other in town.

After a while, the newness wore off so I packed the remaining button supplies up and put them on a shelf in my sewing room where they remained, untouched, until last summer when we took our 8-year-old granddaughter, Megan, camping with us.

As we packed for our trip to our favorite lake, I threw in a few things I thought might be entertaining for her to do in case we hit a rainy day during the trip. I called the box I packed them in our entertainment box. We hit two of those rainy days, but thanks to our entertainment box, Megan never lacked for something to keep her busy.

During those two days, she managed to make bead necklaces, to mold and bake some clay figures, to do a paint-by-number picture, to make a lot of joyful (to her ears anyway) noise upon a wooden flute, and to have tons of fun with the left-over supplies in my button-making kit.

The kit was a Badge-A-Minit kit that originally sold for just under $30, but I guarantee you that we got far more than our money's worth out of it.

Together, Megan and I studied the directions for making a button. I needed a review because it had been quite a while since I had made a button, but Megan had the steps completely memorized by the time we were ready to start on the first button.

Before the actual button-making began, Megan chose a design to use in making a button to take home for each member of her family, which included Mom, Dad, a younger sister, and an older sister and older brother. The kit had lots of designs; some of cute little cats and dogs suitable for moms and a little sister; others had smart aleck sayings more appropriate for bigger brothers and sisters; and then of course, there was a perfect one for her dad-one with a cartoon picture of a man playing golf, which her dad loves to do.

Making a button takes some assembly work and getting all 5 pieces for each button lined up and ready to go took the better part of a rainy afternoon but it was so much fun, we didn't even notice how quickly the time passed.

I picked out a couple of sets with pictures that we didn't especially like for her to practice on, and Megan set to work.

I was amazed at how well the buttons turned out. You really have to make sure the button and all its components are lined up correctly at each step of the process, or your button will turn out with the picture squished off to the side, or with the clear plastic liner meant to protect the picture not clamped in properly. One of the trial buttons was pretty much a flop, but we both learned from the mistakes and when the 2^nd trial turned out well, Megan set to work on her family buttons.

Button-making was so much fun that a certain little girl didn't even want to stop for our evening meal so we put off eating until the 5 gift buttons were done, even though one didn't work out and a new design had to be chosen for re-doing it.

The dinner table conversation that night was all about buttons and how many friends and acquaintances would just love to have a button to wear when we returned from our vacation, and how we could make lots of money selling buttons to people.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough supplies on hand to do more than a few more buttons, and the sun came out the next day, so the button-making kit went back into the entertainment box to wait for another rainy day.

Our camping trip to the lake this year is set for late August. I've restocked the button supplies, and now I'm thinking of calling the weatherman to make sure we will be having at least one rainy day while we are at the lake this year.

*Check out the links included with this article if you want to try button-making yourself. and start with a beginner kit to see if you really enjoy the work before investing much money in it. Later, you can buy supplies in larger amounts which will bring your cost per button down considerably. There are also automated machines which save a lot of the hand work, but which are only practical if you are receiving more orders than you can keep up with.