do you mind me asking you how you produce your button badges?
sure! it's kind of lengthy so im putting it under a cut.
first i draw a sketch in the button template ive pulled together over the past year, which is a 3.25" square with several circles whited out. the template is based off of one i found online for 1.25" button badges.
here's hermione's art, for instance, and here it is without the markup circles:
i use an interior 50% opacity circle to mark where the edges of the badge will fall, and then there is a black line to indicate where to cut, and the rest of the area outside of that is whited out. I use the badge-a-minit button parts/machine line and idk about other machines but w/ badge a minit its important to cut either very precisely on the line or slightly within the border, bc having too much extra can mess up your pins.
anyway once the art is done i select within the whiteout and copy the circle area, and paste it into a word doc. it'll be huge, but i resize each circle down to 1.625 inches. this way i fit 24 pin images per page (6 rows of 4) with the margins arranged thus:
when that is done i print them out at school on the nicer quality paper we get (nothing too stiff bc thats bad w/ the pins) and carefully cut out each piece of art.
i store my button art in baggies by character and then in a larger bag by series.
once the art is cut out i try to keep 3-4 buttons per character in stock, and there are 2 ways i can make the buttons. the preferable method is with the table press at my school, which is very fast and easy and it's easy to make good quality. here's a video of a badge-a-minit machine for larger buttons but. it works the same way.
if i cant access the machine for some reason or i am at a con, i use my hand press and some annotated instructions zyn kindly shared with me in 2012. even with the annotated instructions the hand press has a far lower rate of producing good quality buttons, but it works in a pinch. (it is not worth the $80 i paid for it tho, save your money and buy something better if thats the route u wanna take)
here's the hand press & button parts:
the website for badge-a-minit
ive heard good things about these machines also. i am pretty sure yova uses one of these machines and i bought her pins at AX this summer and they were NICE!!!
ok i organized my buttons into different psds by fandom and i counted and I think i have about 100 different designs?? most of them incomplete but. yea.
i also have atla pins somewhere and some spn pins but i dont remember where i put the files so thats for another day,
