Two or three months ago I decided that I wanted to add something to my zine shop. Handmade one-inch buttons seemed like the way to go. There's just somethin' about fandom that translates well to the button format, and I wanted to explore that with the button sets that I came up with.
Button machines can be a little on the pricey side ($200) when you're ballin' on a budget. Once I got it in my head that I wanted to produce buttons, I spent a few weeks actually workin' on designs to make sure that I could come up with enough variations to justify the effort...and the expense.
The "Giant Robots" button set pictured above was the first of many sets that quickly came to mind. When I was six or seven-years-old, a set of buttons like that is somethin' that I woulda' killed to have pinned to my t-shirt or backpack.
Hell, even as a full-grown adult this set seems pretty desirable. (Haha.)
When my button machine arrived early last week, the Giant Robots set was the very first I cranked out. Featured clockwise are the Japanese kaiju (monster) characters Giant Robo, Goldar, Jet Jaguar, Mechagodzilla, Spectreman and Ultraman (center).
This past Saturday I put up a set of these in the pod at the day job and it added a nice change to the scenery. They're small, but they really pack a punch.
Yes, I'm well on my way with this process. After putting in some serious prep-work, I have nearly fifty different button sets already designed. This past Sunday, I even started posting 'em online through existing sales channels.
Tonight, just before starting this blog post I also received an e-mail from a prospective buyer, asking if I had any more of the set pictured above. I'd only made two sets last week, and after takin' the one for myself, the other was purchased soon after I posted it on Ebay.
I replied that I should have more of the buttons in question towards the end of the week. A few minutes later I received a fairly stirring response.
Apparently, the buttons are going to be a gift for the buyer's seven-year-old son, who he describes as a "huge kaiju fan." The child has cerebral palsy, and his dad helps him by collecting all of the vinyl kaiju figures that his son asks for. The button set will be a surprise addition to that growing kaiju collection.
Call me a softie, but I couldn't help but be a little moved by that. And maybe I was also moved by the thought of a seven-year-old receiving these buttons, and perhaps loving 'em as much today as the seven-year-old version of me would have loved them "yesterday."
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