News

Buttons Away

Rose and Jen\'s buttons heading out.

More shipping today! The photo above is from Rose and Jen’s 43rd LD button project. All those boxes are full of buttons. “Ohhhh yeah!” Jen said. We concur. They get so many buttons out the door. We’re continually in awe of them!

We sent out another Adopt-A-Battleground State batch of buttons today. The great state of Michigan was adopted by Sebastian. Ok, it was supposed to be Wisconsin, but at the last minute Jody and Sebastian had a numbers crunching meeting and decided Michigan was now more of a battleground state than Wisconsin since Obama’s numbers are steadily moving up in WI. Sorry WI, but WTG!

A big thank you to Sebastian for his MI sponsorship! Half went to Birmingham and half went to Michael Moore’s hometown, Flint. They also got extra Hockey Moms for Obama buttons. We know those will be greatly needed there.

Shipping out

GLC button making party 9/18

Thanks to all the volunteers that showed up last Thursday to the button making party at the Georgetown Liquor Company. We got buttons made, lots of artwork cut out, and buttons sorted and counted! You all were great. We’re doing it again at Stellar’s Pizza this Wednesday. See the sidebar to the right for upcoming events of ours as well as other Seattle Obama button making events.

Buttons getting ready to ship.The buttons that got made at this party were sent yesterday as part of a 1000 button batch to the battleground state of Ohio! Also, we got out a batch of Veterans for Obama buttons to our friends at the campaign office in Colorado Springs.

The Ohio buttons were part of our Adopt A Battleground State program. The idea is someone donates the cost of a thousands buttons and they can choose which battleground state to send them too. So far we’ve only offered this to local adopters since we didn’t want to get overwhelmed with requests and not be able to fill them in the time we have left until election day. Therefore, we’ve kept this program purposefully quiet.

But I’m so proud of all the work everyone did to get this first 1000 Adopt A Battleground State batch off that I had to mention it and the wonderful adopter, Christine. Thank you so much Christine for the donation and the motivation to get these buttons out! She chose Ohio and that’s where they went. We split the batch to send them to two different campaign offices, 500 to Toledo and 500 to Dayton. Both offices said they were in desperate need of buttons and were excited to hear they were coming.

We have two other Adopt A Battleground State orders that we’re currently working on. If you’re interested in the Adopt A Battleground State program, contact Jody to see if we can currently take on more.

Button making parties!

We’ve got a lot of places and people that need buttons and we need help making them! We’ll be having weekly button making parties for at least the next month. The first one is tonight at the Georgetown Liquor Company. It was planned on short notice, but we hope some folks show up to help us get a big bunch of buttons made. The details are up at MYBO. If the event says it’s full, we may still be able to accommodate a few more people. Contact Jody to see about it. Bring scissors.

We’ll also be making buttons at the GLC on 10/2.

These two parties and all future ones at the Georgetown Liquor Company are 21 and over. However, we know some young people want to make buttons too. Therefore, we’re in the final stages of planning some all ages parties next door from the GLC at Stellar’s Pizza. Keep checking back here for info about those parties.

This Sunday we’ll be taking part in Buttonpalooza! This will be an all day button making extravaganza with our fellow Seattle button makers. You can sign up to make buttons for a shift, or if the slots are all full you can drop by to say hello and pick up a button or two for a $1 donation each.

In supplies news, thanks to all the donations coming in we’re now stocked with button parts for 10,000 buttons! Our printer has been buzzing almost non-stop printing out button artwork. We experimented this week with getting copies of the artwork made at Kinkos. Let’s just say it was an exercise in frustration and we’ll be sticking with our good old Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer, even though it’s a hungry ink beast.

Hockey Moms For Obama & Yes We Can

Two new button templates posted tonight! As requested by actual hockey parents: Hockey Moms For Obama. You saw that coming didn’t you? Hockey moms across this country will love this.

The other new button template is a variation of our popular Washington State-based design series YES WA CAN which of course was a play on the YES WE CAN phrase. When we brought buttons to give out in Denver we had an assortment of the YES WA CAN buttons with us. People continually asked for them, not noticing that they said WA instead of WE. The people have spoken, they clearly wanted a selection of multicolored YES WE CAN buttons. We were asked last month to turn the YES WA CAN into a YES PA CAN design for Pennsylvania. We don’t plan on making many state-specific designs but it was somewhat easy to do and we all know how important Pennsylvania is so we were glad to help out!

Supplies purchase and Beth’s templates

We recently discovered Illinois button maker Beth McLennon now has a template download page on her website, Buttons For Barack! She makes 2.25 inch buttons and we’ve been honored to host some of her designs on our templates page. There’s a whole new bunch of her 2.25 inch designs on her site. Check it out!

Today we made our first purchases with the donations raised at the DNC in Denver. A hundred dollars of your button money bought two color and one black printer ink cartridges, and a 100 page pack of the Kodak glossy photo paper we use. That 100 page pack of paper will print out artwork for 3000 1.25inch buttons! Next week we’ll be purchasing button part supplies with the donations.

Jody has a lead on a used printer, the same model as we’re currently using for printing button artwork, an Epson Stylus Photo 820. Ours started acting a little “eccentric” before we left for Denver. It seems fine now, but we’re worried it’s maybe thinking about throwing in the towel right when we need it most. If this used one checks out fine we’ll be bringing it home for back up.

In other equipment malfunction news, we lost a crucial part to our graphics circle cutter–also right before we left for Denver. It fell out while the cutter was being moved from one room to another. Inexplicably, we can not find the part anywhere. We moved the cutter only 15 feet! We’re starting to think we may have to look into a replacement part. For now, we’ve rigged the cutter to work without the part, but it’s much, much slower. Ugh!