craft night: button maker brooches

One of my favorite gifts this Christmas was a button maker. It makes pretty awesome, basic little buttons. However, Leave it to me to come up with ways to fancy up the conventional. I thought it would be fun to add crafty things like clothing buttons, fabric and ribbons and make our very own button brooches.

Here's a rough step by step...

1. Cut the graphic you want to put on your button. You can use fabric, too. The brooch in the photo above uses it, and it looks pretty snazzy. Being the Lithuanian/German/Irish/Who-Knows-What-Else Girl that I am, I chose this map of Europe.

2. Run it through your button maker. Now I apologize if you're like 99% of the population and you don't own one of these awesome but over-priced machines. I'll bet you can wrap it around an existing button, glue it on the back, and it will look just fine.
3. grab some felt and cut out the shape you would like to back your button.
4. Cut a slit the length of your button's pin and slip the pin through like so. Also, see that little doily in the left hand corner? I did the same with that one.
5. Hot glue that stuff down.
6. Add some buttons or felt flowers—anything really to your liking—and hot glue those to your button front. Then pin that baby on!
Here's a sampling of the final products!

P.S. I'm new to this tutorial writing thing, and this project was pretty open-ended, so if you have any questions, please ask! I hope you take a stab at this super-fun project. My friends and I had a blast with this one.