A month or so ago I purchased a Badge-A-Minit button maker.  I wrote then that I would talk more about making buttons.  So I guess you can consider this an informal review of the Badge-A-Minit starter kit, advice on button artwork, and a heads up about some new caches I am working on...

The Process

The kit comes with a series of plastic rings and disks and a hand press.  Making the buttons can actually be a very tricky business.

The button face plate, the artwork, and the plastic cover sheet go into the blue ring face up.  Then the yellow ring is placed into the blue ring and rotated until the tabs lock in place.  When turning the yellow ring, I've found the artwork sometimes will turn a little unless you put a finger or two on it to hold it in place.

Then you flip over the assembly and put it face down on a flat surface.  The gray ring is then dropped into the blue ring, and the green disc is placed on top of the grey ring.  Then you stand up (yes it actually works better if you are standing) and press down on the green ring with a sharp but even pressure until you hear a snap.  This pushes the button face into the artwork and plastic so that the artwork folds around the sides of it.  If the green ring isn't pushed down exactly straight and even, the artwork or the plastic coversheet will slip and the button will be ruined.

Then you flip the assembly over and remove the green disc and grey ring, place the assembly back on the flat surface and place the red disc on top.  Then stand and press down on the red disc evenly.  This pushes the button back down into its seat and causes the edges of the artwork and coversheet to fold around to the back side of the button.  If you don't apply pressure evenly the artwork and coversheet can crimp nastily, and not seal up properly when the back of the button goes on.

Then in the last step, you flip the assembly over and drop in a button backplate (usually a pin, but it could be a magnet or have a velcro tab) and then place the green disc over it.  Now the assembly is ready to be flipped over and jockeyed into the press which is usually awkward.  The pressure point on the press should be lined up with an indentation in the center of the red ring.  Then PRESS!!!

If everything was done correctly, when you pull the assembly out of the press and remove the red ring, you'll find a well-formed button underneath.

Unfortunately it is very easy to mess up and produce a ruined button.  Unfortunately once a damaged button is made, there is no way to fix it, and you are out the button pieces for that button.

With enough practice you can minimize the failure rate.  I made about 50 buttons yesterday and had three that came out messed up.  I haven't timed myself, but I doubt highly that I make a badge in a minute.

I like the kit, but it is awkward to use at times, and it feels prone to fall apart when you are trying to get the assembly into the press.  Plus, the problems caused by uneven application of pressure could be easily solved by putting attachments on the press that would allow it to be used instead of trying to do it manually.

But it does make very nice two-and-a-quarter-inch buttons.

Button Artwork

The first thing you'll need is a template.  Although the button face is 2.25" wide, the paper circle upon which the artwork is drawn needs to be 2.75" wide.  The template I use is shown at right.  The circle is 2.75" wide, and the hash marks do not extend far enough into the circle to appear on the button face.  If you have Canvas 7, here's the button template as a canvas document.

When you draw your artwork be sure to center it in this circle.  One thing I found with artwork is that it never lines up exactly as you expect.  Thus it's probably a bad idea to create artwork with a circular outer border.  When you actually get your end-result button, the circle won't appear perfectly centered.  Thus when I draw artwork on the template, I extend the artwork all the way to the edges of the 2.75" circle, and only keep the important portion inside of a 2.25" circular region at the center.  Like this:

When actually stamped into a button, the text shown here will come very close to the edges.  Having the extra half-inch of artwork means that if the artwork is a millimeter off in any direction, you won't see a white edge of the picture.

Once you have your artwork printed, you'll need to cut them out.  If you happen to have a 2.75" circular die cutter, awesome, otherwise cutting them can be a pain in the butt.  To speed that process I purchased something called a "circle scissor".

It's a plastic ring that you put over your drawing, under which you put a plastic mat.  The ring contains a disk which is transparent and which has a crosshair on it, so you can center it over your artwork.  The disk has hundreds of holes in it, each one a different number of mm from the center, and sits on top of a bunch of tiny ball bearings, so it will rotate inside the ring.  You stick a pen that has a cutting blade on the end through the hole corresponding to the diameter you want (in this case, 70mm) and drag the blade around in a circle.  The head of the pen swivels as the disk rotates and it cuts a very nice clean circle... sometimes.

It matters how you hold the pen, I've noticed if you aren't very careful, it won't cut all the way around. But it is still easier than using scissors.  There may be other ways to cut circles, but this works pretty good.  The scissor I am using is manufactured by EK Success.

Finished Product

The finished product is pretty cool.  All in all it is a time consuming process.  Drawing the artwork is the fun part.  Cutting the artwork and assembling the buttons is decidedly not fun.  But they look so neat when done, it's worth it.

In three days, the dragon caches in Coggshall Park had enough vistors to completely deplete the finders buttons.  Many people commented on how neat they were on the cache logs.

So yesterday I made up a bunch of finders buttons and then hiked out to the cache sites to replenish them.  I'm also working on two new caches to be placed in a nearby wildlife sanctuary.  I already have permission, and have selected locations.  I am just waiting for the ammo boxes to arrive and then I will be able to place Tiarrel's Aerie and Morrich's Barrow.  The buttons shown above will be the finders buttons for these new caches.

Hopefully people will enjoy them as much as they did the others.