Last week we told you all about ornament buttons, which are obviously all the rage during the holiday season. They are a great way to customize and personalize your Christmas tree with sentimental buttons you can easily make all on your own.

And wouldn’t you know it, just a few hours after we published that post one our awesome readers sent in pictures of the Christmas ornament buttons they had made.

The button ornaments pictured below come courtesy of our friends at CustomWrapz.com. And in our humble opinion, they are…fantastic!

I bet you didn’t realize – in the midst of your Thanksgiving Day preparations and early Christmas shopping – that another important holiday had snuck up on you. But it has.

National Button Day!

Yes, every November 16th is indeed our national day of making, celebrating, and enjoying the wonderful world of buttons.

And of course you just know that we cannot let an important day like this go by without recognizing it, wishing you a happy National Button Day, and providing a few suggestions for how to celebrate.

Three Suggestions for How To
Celebrate National Button Day

1. Design and Make a New Button

If you already have your button machine at the ready with supplies in tow, why not carve out some time today to design and make a new button?

Perhaps you can make a National Button Day button, or prepare for the holidays by making a Thanksgiving or Christmas button, or maybe you want to show a little extra love to your favorite sports team by making a button you can wear during its next game.

Whatever the subject of your button ends up being, we know just the place for you to design it: the Build-a-Button Online Design Center.

Sure, we’re biased, but the fact is that button designing just doesn’t get any easier than with the B-a-B (nor freer, since the free beta period is still going on!).

2. Submit Your Best Work

You may not want to make a button today, but what about all of the buttons you’ve made in the past? Submit them to us because we want to recognize you for your excellent work!

We do a regular Customer Spotlight feature at ABM. Browse past posts here, then take a gander at some of the latest, greatest submissions by our wonderful cadre of customers:

From Nancy (whose submitted Etsy store link unfortunately did not work):

“Monday Morning Warning…need I say more?”

—–

From Nicholas Scott of RedsButtons.com:

“I am very excited about my button machine. I am so excited I choose not to tell people about it because if they knew how easy it was to create and sell buttons…my competition would grow.

Well I have used the key-chains, mirrors, magnets, pins, and accent rings on my buttons. I love all of the products that ABM offer. I only own one machine 2’25 and it has already paid for itself. (With-in the first week!) So this is my only time EVER sharing how much I love my machine!

Here is a button I made for personal use. This button received great feedback. I took a piece of regular white paper, I used my ABM cutter to cut out my shape. I then took a Sharpie marker and hand wrote the message on the button. Then I easily created my custom pin-back button. I wore that button on the same day, due to the button I was able to use it as an ice-breaker to promote my button business.

Sky’s the Limit!”

—–

From Cory Blake (aka Mr. Button Man):

“I made these for a Dennys out here. I also made some buttons for the employees of coca-cola store too, with the Coke Polar Bear on them.”

3. Learn and Interact

If making a new button doesn’t tickle your fancy on this most wonderful day of button celebration, perhaps finding a new button-related club or activity can stir up the old crafting passions once a gain.

The National Button Society has a wealth of information on its website, including its schedule of events for 2011. If one of these happens to be in your area, maybe you can meet up with other button lovers and swap stories and buttons.

Whatever you do on this wonderful holiday, we hope you enjoy it because the most important part of making buttons is to have fun while doing it!

For additional button making tips, ideas, and products, visit our website.

It’s that time again: time for another ABM Customer Spotlight!

As you know, we love highlighting all of our creative and enterprising customers. So make sure you email us with stories and pictures of all the fun, unique items you are making with your ABM products.

Today’s spotlight shines on Edgar McHerly. He sells, among many things, a “bag of buttons” that is creative, colorful, and captivating all at the same time. Here is a picture and an email that Edgar sent to us recently.

Everyone at American Button Machines,

Hey dudes! I got the 1.5″ button press in the mail a few days ago and I am really pleased with it. It has been such a joy to use. I make a lot of different stuff, t shirts, wallets, and art related stuff like that, but nothing is as easy and fast as the buttons. And the joy of squeezing down the handle each time – Oh god, such a thrill, hahaha!

Anyhow, just thought I’d send along some comments from a happy customer.

Edgar R. McHerly

Edgar…thank you for taking the time to write to us. We salute you! Keep up the great work at your online shop, and the bags of buttons look spectacular!

We often get asked by our customers to make buttons for them. We decline every time, and there is one very simple reason why: we don’t want to compete with our customers!

So many of the wonderful people who purchase button machines and supplies from ABM are in the custom button making business. And many of these people are really, really, really, ridiculously good at making custom buttons.

As far as we’re concerned, it’s a perfect relationship: we sell the machines and raw materials; our enterprising customers take and fill custom orders; and you get exactly what you want at the best possible price!

Our question now is this: how do we get the word about our fabulous customers who make and sell custom buttons?

One way we are going to do this is by starting a list of ABM customers that we can relay business to when we get calls for people looking for buttons. It happens all the time, and we want to have a quick and easy reference guide ready for such situations.

Send please, if you are an ABM customer and welcoming of custom button making business, send your info along with the button sizes you make and we will add you to the list. The best way to contact us is via email: sales [at] americanbuttonmachines [dot] com.

We’ve got a quick new Customer Spotlight entry for you today, and it comes courtesy of Twitter.

As I try do at least once every week, I logged in today to see if anyone had messaged us or if anyone had any button making-related questions I could answer. Much to my excitement, there were a few messages. (This is typically what happens, but it’s still exciting every time! And that’s why you should follow us.)

One of the messages was from Twitter user @MonkeyThreads and said the following:

@ABMACHINES I worked my machine making 100 wedding favors. http://www.etsy.com/listing/37116137/bottle-opener-i-heart-my-wife-225-inches

Naturally I clicked on the link, and what I found was, indeed, quite the wedding favor!

Here is the best part though: even if you weren’t invited to the wedding, you can still pick up these fun bottle openers.

Click here to buy these bottle openers from Monkey Threads’ page on Etsy (called Gopherella). They are just $4.00 a pop.

And ladies, as the product description suggests, this makes a great gift for your husbands with football season just around the bend.

And if you want to make your own bottle openers, check out our 2.25″ button machine and bottle opener supplies.

We are proud to call the Houston Museum of Natural Science one of our customers and it is our pleasure to feature HMNS in an especially timely edition of our Customer Spotlight today.

Why is it so timely? Well, because the HMNS is distributing buttons to commemorate an impending experience that has been described as “a combination of rotting vegetation and rotting flesh.”

Wait…what?

Allow me to explain.

The HMNS is currently home to a rare flower called Amorphophallus Titanum, commonly referred to as the Corpse Flower because of the pungent odor released when it blooms. The problem (or relief, depending on your perspective and sensitivity of smell) is that the Corpse Flower rarely blooms in captivity. (Click here to see pictures.)

Currently there are only 29 of these flowers in captivity throughout the world and it has been growing for over six years at the HMNS without flowering. What has everyone excited is that right now — literally right now as I type this — the HMNS staff and curious visitors are on high alert because the flower could bloom at any second.

And this is where the buttons come in. The HMNS has created “Team Lois”, “I Love Lois”, and “Bring on the Funk” buttons, along with many others, to commemorate the blooming of this gargantuan 6 foot tall, 30 pound behemoth of a flower.

Here are a few images of the buttons, which were made using button machines from ABM and have been selling “like hot cakes”:

The following videos provide some more background on the flower and the current excitement level about its impending bloom at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. (The first one features our buttons!)

For all of the latest information on Lois and the status of her bloom, the best places to go are the Corpse Flower page on the HMNS website and on Twitter (@hmns). Follow the hashtag #corpseflower for up-to-the-second news.

We regularly receive emails from our customers telling us how much they love their button machines and other button making supplies. These emails often regale us with exciting stories and pictures of the buttons and other unique craft items they have used their button machine to make.

Our Customer Spotlight, as regular readers know, was created to allow us to reciprocate a little bit of this button love and turn the spotlight back on our wonderful customers that we love and appreciate so much.

Today’s Customer Spotlight is ellaprint.com, a website that allows you to create photo art, clothing, gifts, and decor that you design. Sounds pretty cool huh?

Well it is!

Fran from from ellaprint.com recently emailed us to share her thoughts on our button machine and the success they had with their first project using it:

Good Day,

I just wanted to drop a line to you to let you know that we love our button machine. We have used the Slater machine in the past, the one with all those rings and we were always so frustrated with the consistency and ease to make buttons.

Our first project with this new machine was 300 pins, 100 of each design. We received the machine at 3:30 in the afternoon on Thursday and finished the job in no time at all. We watched the video and by the second button we were PRO’s! I n fact we delivered the buttons the very next morning!   Now that customer wants us to do all their button work.

Thank you for an easy to use machine that works effortlessly.

Fran

ellaprint.com

Fran, we are very happy that you have had such a great experience with our button machine and appreciate you giving us a shot and trying out our wonderful button makers in the first place!

Now, dear reader, we implore you to give ellaprint.com a try the next time you are looking to create some interesting and personalized home decorations.

As their website says, ellaprint.com gives you “better living through imagery.” So why not start living better today? Check ‘em out: ellaprint.com

We are very, very proud and excited about featuring Operation Smiley Face as our latest ABM Customer Spotlight. When you hear the story behind this wonderful operation, and the incredible woman who is its driving force, you will understand why.

Operation Smiley Face was started by a women (whose name is not listed on her website other than as “Operation Smiley Face“) who is currently dealing with stage 4 Metastic Breast Cancer that had already spread to her lymph nodes and lungs when she was first diagnosed in August of 2009. This came on the heels of more than a decade of coping with her 1998 diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis.

You might read that paragraph and think that she has little to smile and be positive about. And to you or I that might be the case, but this inspiring woman has chosen to focus on the positives despite the cavalcade of negatives facing her every day.

Incredibly, she has somehow found a way to not only keep herself smiling, but to make other people – including and especially strangers she has never met – smiling too.

Here is her mission, simply put in the About Me section of the Operation Smiley Face website:

It is my heart’s desire to do what I can to make the world a little kinder while I’m here. Spreading smiles is my way of doing that.

And how does she go about spreading these smiles? That is where this story gets interesting. The first post on Operation Smiley Face describes the author’s first successful smile mission:

While standing in line I noticed that the young lady behind me had one item. So I asked the nice cashier lady to please add the item onto my bill. The young woman gave me a sweet smile. Nothing over the top, just sweet and appreciative. I gave her a Smile Card from http://helpothers.org/ and asked her to pass the kindness (and the card) on to someone else in the near future.

Two posts later, we are regaled by the genesis of the current Operation Smiley Face mission, which involves the creation of smiley fabric buttons, pins, and tokens that are given away by request as well as left for complete strangers.

I LOVE to cross stitch, and since starting this “mission to make people smile” I’ve been wondering about how I could incorporate it into the project. Finally, I got an idea! It was to design a Smiley Face pattern that I could cross stitch on fabric, and then press into 2 1/4″ pinback button using my button machines! There’s just something about a Smiley Face that makes you feel like smiling when you see it, and that’s what Operation Smiley Face is all about!

As a means of distributing her smiles, “lollipop drops” were executed with son (aka her “partner in kindness). This involved tying a smile card to a lollipop and “dropping” them throughout her neighborhood. These drops were so successful in the neighborhood and at places like the post office and Wal-Mart that people started donating supplies to our secret smile giver. She received smile stickers and lollipops, among other items, which helped her to further spread smiles through her community.

She also began leaving smiles for people to pick up at the gas station pump, on windshields, and any other people she could think of. In addition, she started sending the smiley face fabric buttons described above to people who requested them. In total, 595 buttons were given away in 2009. As of the day this was published, 100 had already been given away in 2010!

We encourage you to visit the Operation Smiley Face blog and read the entries. Each one houses a little nugget of inspiration and good cheer that will achieve its mission of making you smile. We are extremely proud to call Operation Smiley Face our customer and are overjoyed to know that our button machines are involved in such a terrific cause for such a terrific woman.

In addition to all of the buttons that she passes on for free, she sells a special group of them on her Etsy page. The proceeds help fund her giveaways. If you want to help out but don’t want to buy a button, you can also donate directly through PayPal. There is a button in the left sidebar on the Operation Smiley website.

And now that you’re done reading, why not go give someone a smile? There’s a good chance that it will not only brighten their day, but brighten yours too.

Today’s customer spotlight shines on the fine folks over at Selvedge House, which is based in Brisbane, Australia. Selvedge House, as their website explains, provides a collection of hand crafted designer textiles, patterns and craft kits.

Recently, Danielle from Selvedge House sent us an email to tell us know how “brilliant” our button machine work and “how much fun” they have using it well set up at a weekend market stall. And in addition to fun, Danielle informs us that during that one weekend craft fair they pretty much made the cost of the machine back.

Here is a portion of Danielle’s email to us and some pictures from their weekend:

Just wanted to drop you a line and say how brilliant our machine is and how much fun we had with it at our weekend market stall (we think we pretty much made the cost back!).

Rather than make the mirrors/badges ourselves we wanted it to be an interactive part of our stall to get a bit of excitement and crowding happening (which worked well, once you started showing one person, a crowd gathered).

We used mainly Australian hand screen printed organic cotton/linen blend fabrics which looked awesome and had no problems with using.

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Danielle is far from the first person who emailed to let us know that they have used ABM products to have fun and make money at craft fairs. View our complete list of button machines and button supplies to see what you can take to the next craft fair in your area.

Also, use the following link if you are interested in making fabric mirrors like the ones described in Danielle’s email and that you can see in the pictures.

Nothing makes us happier than knowing that one of our products saved someone money, helped them create a memorable item, or generally just made their life a little bit better.

As we get ready to ramp back up again after another wonderful holiday season, we want to share with you a recent email that we received from one of our customers who reached out to us after being pleasantly surprised by how much time and money he saved with our Econo Circle Cutter.

This email is from Tony Djukic, from Smart Dynamic Workforce Solutions in Ontario:

Just finished cutting through about 250 round 3.75″ labels with the Econo Circle Cutter that was delivered this afternoon.

Took just under 2 and a half hours.  Which, by my estimation, isn’t bad.  Granted, the first half hour was used to get the measurement right and to try and figure where specifically to centre the cutting tool, etc…

I’ve attached a photo of the left over templates – pretty impressive…

Thanks for all of your help, well worth the cost.

We’re glad the cutter worked out so well Tony, and thanks for sharing! We encourage all of our customers to share their stories with us. Who knows, you and your company just might end up in the Customer Spotlight!

Have a great start to 2010 everyone!