In 2024, I made plans to visit the United States to go to Otakon and visit some of the friends I'd made through playing Dungeons & Dragons. I wanted to try doing something special. Coincidentally, I'd just learned that my local library has a button press and a Cricut machine...

I drew over templates from American Button Machines and drew a mockup of what I wanted the buttons to look like. Here's what that looked like.

Drawing of an Aasimar man with pale skin, long blond hair, and brown eyes. He's drawn in profile on a green background. Besides him are stylized white flowers-- morning glories.

Related posts from 2024/03/11

Coincidentally, one of the other players had already asked each of us what flower(s) we associate with our characters, so this was a cinch for me. I repeated the process for each of our characters + one talking sword controlled by the DM.

Similar buttons for a party of five humanoid characters drawn in profile, plus a talking sword. From top to bottom, left to right: a seemingly-human woman with pale skin, long, purple hair and heavy makeup, wearing a black witch hat with red accents, a frilly white shirt, and a red jacket with golden epaulettes. Around her are stylized outlines of roses. She's labelled as 'MNEMOSYNE'; a seemingly-human man with pale skin, curly brown hair, blue eys, and patchy stubble. He's wearing a purple suit with a red tie, and has a solemn expression. Several stylized poppies spring up from below him. He's labelled as 'JEMY'; A half-elf girl with dark skin and textured white hair, with one shaved side and the rest pulled up into a long ponytail. She's wearing bright golden jewellery, including two huge bar earrings and a nose piercing, as well as a purple suit that matches Jemy's. Around her are stylized peonies. She's labelled 'PEONY'; a tiefling woman with bright pink skin and two large horns protruding from her forehead. She has dark sclera with blue eyes, and is wearing a skin-tight yellow dress with a boob cutout. She has a cute tail springing up behind her. Popping up around her are stylized snapdragons. She's labelled 'SKYLAR';The blond Aasimar man from the mockup drawing, labelled 'MATTHEW';An ornate white rapier, labelled 'VIVIAN'.
Later on in this story, the woman in the top-left was revealed to be a secret Changeling. So I made another to reflect that. Plus an extra one for our blood hunter because I love her.

Two more buttons. On the right is a changeling woman with gray skin and short white hair, labelled 'MNEMOSYNE', wearing the same clothes as the Mnemosyne from the above image. She's surrounded by lillies. On the left is a drawing of the half-elf girl from the previous image, rendered in cool blues, save for a solid red ring obscuring her face; the place where her face and the ring overlap has a semi-realistic skull, creating an x-ray effect. She's looking up at the camera anxiously.
Next, I actually had to print them off. I only have a crappy black & white laser printer at home, so my first attempt consisted of trips to my local library. While that worked out fine, the print quality was pretty bad. But for the time being, I'd try to make buttons with them. The size of button press at my local library (2.5 inches) was a little smaller than each of my drawings (3.5 inches), but resizing them in Photoshop was easy as pie.

Related posts from 2024/03/27 - 2024/03/30





The designs from the first image pressed into pinback buttons, along with two Cardcaptor Sakura test buttons.
At the same time, though, my plan to use the library's Cricut was not panning out at all... I watched so many tutorials for nothing. Still, I wanted to see The Sticker Plan through...! And get my money's worth out of the label paper I bought.

Related posts from 2024/03/30 - 2024/04/26


By the way, I was in my final semester of college at this point. Honestly, having a capital P Project to do with clear goals was a fun way to get my mind off of finals (and later, my pharmacy placements.) In the end, I had to print off the "stickers" on plain paper, glue them onto the labels, and cut them off... It was unintuitive and fairly time-consuming, but it was fun.

Related posts from 2024/05/08 - 2024/05/21


At this point, I had two different problems that could be solved with one solution; one was the issue of my finished buttons having cut-off text, and the other was the print quality at my local library being terrible. (It doesn't come through well in photos, but it really was bad-- especially for certain designs with more complicated details.) The colour printer at my campus, however:
  1. Was cheaper to use
  2. Was easier to access (While it was farther from my house, I was on campus nearly every day, and money for printing could be loaded easily from my cellphone)
  3. Could print off larger paper sizes, up to tabloid (11 x 17 inches)
  4. Most importantly, the pages it printed were beautiful!!!!
These printouts were vibrant and glossy, with none of the ugly computer noise of my local public library. This is what my tuition was paying for, I suppose...

Even after my on-campus classes ended and I began my first placement at a hospital (with a two hour morning commute, for some reason), I could return to a nearer campus of my college on weekends. This one was right next to the local public library, even... I felt like I was cheating on my wife right in front of her eyes.

This infidelity didn't last long, though, because it was time to press some buttons. I'd learned a lot after my first round of button-making; namely, I needed to add way more bleed to those button templates!!!! My guess was that the default print settings at both the library and on campus resized the images I was trying to print, even when selecting "full page print" from the computers. The library had undergone some big renovations over lockdown, so the computers were brand-new and rocking the newest versions of Photoshop. (This was before the rise of Gen-AI slop features, thankfully.) After poking around with my designs, my second round of pressing buttons went much better-- I even made some more buttons just for fun, to pretty up my bag for Otakon and to give to my friends. This was also around when the aformentioned secret changeling reveal happened.

Related posts from 2024/06/27 - 2024/06/29



Ignore the fact that I apparently can't tell left from right, please...!

The same buttons, but with brighter colours. The Changeling button is included in this batch.
The back of one of the buttons; a simple metal backing with a pin across the top.
Related post from 2024/06/29

These buttons weren't perfect-- Reds and pinks come out a bit too saturated, and my button-pressing skill could use some work-- but they were much nicer-looking than my initial attempts. Don't worry, though; the ugly buttons still had their day in the sun. After Otakon, I "auctioned" off each of them off to the other players. Incidentally, my character's button has his as-of-yet unrevealed true name on it, so one of them got a little dose of #secrets as a treat.

PowerPoint slide of the blond Aasimar character's button design. The side where his name should be is covered up with a '!!!Viva Mexico!!!' GIF. A box on the side reads: 'Who want him?' 'Cynn (viva la mexico not included)'

Thanks for reading all the way through my self-indulgent ramble about one of the weirdest periods of my life. Weird for almost entirely self-imposed reasons. I have a few pictures of my decked-out bag on my photos page. Maybe I'll make a dedicated page to all of the buttons I own one day... By the way, I went to press some more buttons a few months into 2025, and found out the library had jacked up the price of materials for the button press. #MyInfluence?!

Written from 2026/05/04 - 2026/05/06

back to top?