This Weekend's Project: Button Making

Sometimes, you need to sew on some buttons. Hopefully, you won't need to sew on doll buttons for 1:6 scale clothes. When you do, you have to end up buying these for 5 for $1.30 at a clothing/fabric store.

Unfortunately, they only sell 5mm diameter buttons of this color. What if you need something that's not... a clear plastic circle?

Being the general nature of how things are made here, you can guess what we're gonna use! Magic! The button thickness is roughly 4 layers thick. Five or six layers can also work, but I don't need the extra thickness. If you wish to try to waterproof these, you can consider covering them in a layer of Loc-tite glue or varnish/epoxy. If you were smarter, you would have some spare plastic lying around to make these with. The only plastic I have handy is a lot of CD jewel cases and some VHS tapes. Not quite ideal to work with.

For the shape, you're gonna need to work on your X-acto skills. Or find a nice hole punch that is the right size. Conveniently, a 1/4" hole punch is about the same diameter for these buttons, but they might be a bit large. I'm making triangular shaped buttons, so I'm going to have to use lots of imprecise cutting and eyeballing. I could have measured these out, but that's too late.

The holes for the buttons can be drilled out with a 1/8" drill bit. Magic cards don't have a lot of strength to them against drilling, so go slow. Or if you used a real stock material like PLASTIC, you'll be fine using a hand drill. Dremel users will want to make the holes first before cutting their final shape. Nothing like drilling a hole and suddenly finding out that the buttonhole is bleeding. Space your button holes 1mm apart.

Ideally at this point, I'd have something to show for my task. I'll highlight the results in the next post, even though the result will be very small.