Crafting with Teenagers: DIY Pinback Buttons

 Okay, this isn't so much a teenager-specific craft, because Syd has been happily creating her own 1" pinback buttons since she was a brilliant and adorable three years old:

Check out my amazing little peanut in action!

Yes, she's always been a creative and mechanical genius.

Even though we never go anywhere to show them off anymore, Syd still likes making pinback buttons (here's the exact button machine I've apparently owned for over a decade now!), and I'm pretty sure that this is a universally appealing teenager craft. Here's one of the handmade Black Lives Matter pinbacks that she made near the start of the pandemic, when we were quarantining our way through a homeschool social justice unit:

I REALLY miss homeschooling that kid. 

A little while ago, Matt and Syd were cleaning out the garage, when Syd came across a box with the moveable type for my business card stamp inside (the one we own is the same brand and very similar to this one, only mine is self-inking, which after a decade of use I actually think I do not prefer!):

She asked if she could use my stamp set to make her own pinbacks, and even though putting the moveable type of my business card back on the stamp afterwards was a PAIN IN THE ASS, I told her yes because I love her.

Want to know what kind of custom stamped pinback a teenager would make?

This kind:

It's very on-brand!

And now I'm on the lookout for more fun stamped phrases that would fit on a 1" pinback button, EVEN if it means having to redo that whole entire business card stamp again, ugh. I also think they would be a great canvas for creating adorable and intricate little artworks... if only I can convince my local artist to make a bespoke creation or two!

I even found a way to display them that doesn't require going out into society:

If you, too, want to sneak some learnin' into DIY pinback button making, here are some ways we've incorporated homemade pinbacks into our homeschool:

• slogans. Syd did this for our social justice study, of course, but it would also be super fun to let kids make their own campaign buttons for civics or history studies.
• party favors and giveaways. One year, the kids designed their own Girl Scout cookie pinbacks and gave them out as "prizes" when customers bought a certain number of cookies. It was a terrific kid-led marketing exercise!
• moveable alphabet. When Syd was a pre-reader, I used an alphabet punch set and made several sets of moveable alphabets, using the button base but not the pins. The kids used them interchangeably with the rest of our moveable alphabet collection for all kinds of early reading exercises.

• chores. For a couple of years, when the kids were especially high-energy and rascally, I kept a bag of a billion chore buttons in a little bag on a hallway table. Each of the million times a day that the kids did something ratty--punched her sister, left her half-eaten lunch in the middle of the floor, lost her shoes for the fiftieth time that hour, etc.--instead of dealing with the emotion or reasoning or whatever behind the infraction like a good parent, I'd just wearily tell her to go pull a chore. They were all small and random tasks that would take anywhere between 5-10 minutes to complete, stuff like picking up all the sticks in the backyard, or spray cleaning the bathroom sink, or vacuuming the couch with the handheld minivac. When the kids weren't in trouble they could also pull a chore to earn quarters, and if a kid's infraction had been something ratty towards her sister and I was mad about it, I'd sometimes make her pull a chore and complete it, and then hand her a quarter and make her GIVE IT TO HER SISTER, MWA-HA-HA! I don't necessarily think chores as punishment is a sound discipline strategy, but each time I did welcome the chance to lower the everyday chaos in our household a tiny bit.

Interested in even more unsound but highly effective discipline strategies? Well, you'll barely even find those on my Craft Knife Facebook page anymore, but you WILL find a bunch more random craft and homeschool projects and a lot of chaos energy that will probably make you feel a ton better about your own household!

Lots of Vintage Comic Book Pinbacks on Pumpkin+Bear

Goal achieved!

I said that I wanted to list my vintage comic book pinback buttons, but stuff like that takes absolute AGES to photograph and upload and list, so I kept putting it off. But it turns out that making the last denim slipcover for my couch--the biggest and wonkiest-shaped slipcover of them all--is an even more loathsome task than this, because I found myself procrastinating from my most-dreaded chore by completing this slightly less-dreaded chore. It took ALL the time that I had to spare from our homeschooling day one day to take the photographs...

...although I did have some help:

This is why I never advertise that my items come from a pet-free home!

It took FOREVER, but I could not stop myself from listing my favorite pinbacks individually:

There! Look! A Ghost and a Witch!

I Wish This Was Connecticut

Project Cadmus Has Stolen Superman's Body

I Don't Want to Hear about Politics or Wars

Aiieee! Merlin Smites Us Again!

But in Case You Haven't Noticed, I'm Not Exactly Menses Material

That's Variations in D Minor by JS Bach

But the Children--What about the Children?

But Mutants are the Only Ones Who aren't Protected by Laws

There! Look! A Ghost and a Witch!

 I did put a set together just of my overly-large collection of Hulk comic book pinbacks:


 

 

 

That's... a lot of Hulk pinbacks. I don't know. Hulk is awesome.

I also set up a bunch of different sets of randomly selected vintage comic book pinbacks. This is, like, a SMALL collection of what I've made. I kinda got obsessed with making comic book pinbacks there for a while...

See that bag? The entire hoard lives in there:

For a while I also got obsessed with making pinbacks from vintage dictionary pages:

BOOKWORM

EXTRAORDINARY 

MALADJUSTED

LOTHARIO

BROTHERHOOD

LADY

HEROISM

INCUBUS

They're just as fun to do as the comic book pinbacks, because I'm a word nerd!

I still have plenty of things that I want to stock--sets of bean bag chickens, surplus play silks, Halloween-themed candle sets, and ideally some new candlesticks--but it's not going to be this weekend! Syd's Nutcracker audition is this afternoon, so this morning we're streaming the Nutcracker score and misting lavender essential oil and modeling calmness, and as soon as that's done we've got to start baking a seven-layer rainbow cake and finishing the party favors and putting Girl Scout vests in order, because tomorrow my troop is having their Bridging ceremony and celebration, and there's still so much rainbow-themed stuff to prepare!

Deep breath into the lavender mist...

Comic Book Pinbacks for Pumpkin+Bear Etsy

Back when I did craft fairs, I looooooved making pinbacks from comic books. The superheroes and the sound effects all made good buttons, but my favorite task was to find interesting bits of dialogue to punch out, especially if they said something completely different when taken out of context.

It takes a lot of work to photograph and write an etsy listing, so I've balked at listing these comic book pinbacks individually in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop... until now. For a little while, at least. Call it an experiment. Or call it a discovery of tons of comic book pinbacks as I was packing, and a realization that I probably should neither completely blanket my backpack in them nor give them away as Christmas presents for the next five years.

Or call it procrastination, because unpacking SUCKS!

Here's my first listing, Proceed with Caution:

I'll be adding more comic book pinbacks over the next few days, and every time you see a new one appear in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, you'll know that there's some crucial house chore that I REALLY should be doing instead.

A DIY Moveable Alphabet

When the girls are first learning something, I really like to separate out the various skills involved, especially with writing, which both girls, and Willow in particular, still often find challenging in regards to letter formation and positioning.

So although I want Sydney to be able to physically form words, because it helps her read and memorize them, I don't necessarily want her to have to write them--she'll be reading and memorizing with part of her brain, yes, but only the part that's not already focused on which way the "b" goes and which part of "p" sits on the line and how to make "a" so that I don't erase it and ask her to do it again.

Instead, when Syd has a new phonogram to learn, she "builds" her words using a DIY moveable alphabet that we put together. It's mostly made up of Scrabble tiles--

--but we've got some FIMO letters in the mix, and some letters punched out of cardstock and pressed in my pinback button machine, and some that the girls made by sticking alphabet stickers on 1" graph paper and then cutting it out.

I set the alphabet out for Sydney along with a stack of words that practice a particular phonogram, and she sprawls out on our (unvacuumed) carpet to build and read the words:

Handwriting is a separate subject, but one that we do every day, so don't worry--she still gets to write her words out!

The test of a successfully written exercise, for Sydney, is that the letters are all correctly formed AND she can read it to me, so I deviously sneak in a little more practice reading those brand-new phonograms there.

Pin on a Pro-Breastfeeding Pinback

Not that I think that there is anybody who is specifically ANTI-breastfeeding, necessarily (although I do think that there are definitely people whose ideas about breastfeeding, particularly their ideas about when and where and how one should or should not breastfeed, make them, for all intents and purposes, anti-breastfeeding), so I guess these International Breastfeeding Symbol pinbacks, up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, are more of a "Yay, breastfeeding!" stance than a political statement:

 
 
 
I didn't take nearly enough photographs of my own nursing babes, primarily because I'm the one who holds the camera, I suppose, but here's one of little toddler Will having herself some nursies:

Those were some precious times.