making personalized children's buttons

Over the past several weeks, Adelaide and I had been planning and preparing birthday treats for her to give away at her birthday party. I would like to share some of our projects with you over the coming days.

Something that I've been wanting to make for children for some time now are little button pins. This year, I was able to borrow a 1" button maker from a generous friend, and so I decided to make buttons for Adelaide's little friends who would be attending her birthday party.

I have found that little children really love and seem to appreciate having items personalized especially for them, so already knew that I wanted to make first-name-initial pins for them. However, I found myself procrastinating and a couple of days before the party I had yet to even begin. Because of the lack of time, I ended up doing a quick computer search through my old work for inspiration (something I often when looking to create something on the fly). I came across a flyer I had done for our neighbourhood parent-and-tot group years back now, and realised that I could easily pick and choose from my already-made-file to create cute portrait buttons for each child.

Technically, it was easy and fairly quick to modify my Adobe Illustrator file for each child's portrait, as they are composed of just a few simple shapes. The biggest challenge really was trying to correctly recall 18 children's hair styles and eye colours! But when each child's quickie portrait was done, I would show it to Adelaide, and found that she could enthusiastically identify each child. Relief!

Once all of the letter and portraits were finished, we printed them out onto regular paper and Adelaide was able to help me load up the button maker to pop out the buttons - a rather satisfying job which only took a few minutes.

I am always a little bit nervous, when making things for people, that they will end up being disregarded and simple tossed aside. This is especially so when creating things for little children. But I have been rewarded, and have found little children seem to love, appreciate and just know when things have been made especially for them.

And it was lovely to have one usually shy little boy grab me aside many days later, to show me that he had his little buttons pinned proudly onto his winter coat. Once he was sure I had seen, he flashed me a big grin, and then he was gone.