How to make christmas decorations with your button maker. November 10 2012

Personalized gifts for Christmas?  What about hanging family photos in a mirror back button on the tree.  Wow.  Shiny!

It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of ribbon or elastic and a button maker.  As always with buttons you need a good design - regardless what you’re making the design is key.  Most of your effort and energy should go into improving your design but once you have a good design, you can easily make ……..in this case Christmas decorations that can hang on your Christmas Tree.

Firstly I chose to make mirror buttons with a Santa on the front.  You could just use pin-backs or flat backs, they too will reflect the lights of the tree but I decided to use mirrors.  To make mirror buttons you need a 2-1/4” button maker or larger. 2-1/2”, 3”, 3-1/2” all have mirror buttons as do 2”x 3” and 2-1/2” x 3-1/2” buttons.  Also oval buttons make great mirrors.

To make mirrors you need:

Here’s a video explaining how to make mirrors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXgRjUbir8k&feature=share&list=ULtXgRjUbir8k

Once you know how to make the mirror, you need to add the elastic or ribbon to let it hang in the tree.  Here’s a few picks.

In the above example I made a hole in the shim and fed the elastic through. I had some issues with the metal shim cutting the elastic.  I just made the hole with a pointed bradle. But a lot of effort and not the best way.

Even though in the above 2 images the mirror works and hangs on the tree well, the ribbon or elastic does not need to be super strong.  But as you see in the 2 images above it does not look great, if you’re selling these you can see the elastic is not allowing the button to really crimp properly.

By using thin ribbon it works well, carries the weight and crimps the button properly.  I also tried simply taping the ribbon to the back of the image.  That worked well too.

As I said above the ribbon worked best producing a great mirror button for the Christmas tree.

If you’re selling these this is a great product to sell in sets.  Any product that needs not just a single decoration but a hole set is great and if you have a tree full of these mirrors it’s going to be shiny!

But if you want to get professional you could also use tabs and slot back buttons. These are usually used for pendents or key-chain buttons.  Slot back buttons are available for 1-1/2”, 1-3/4”, 2-1/4”, 2-1/2” and 3” sizes.  You can even get 2-3/8” slot backs for badge-a-minit button makers.

This is what slot back buttons with tabs look like:

You can use the above to make professional looking Christmas Decorations and holiday season ornaments for the tree.  Thread ribbon or elastic through the ring.

Happy crafting!