Sorry for the late posting time on today’s Button University lesson. Sometimes the phone just rings and rings and rings and our duty as gatekeepers to the wonderful world of buttons beckons from sunrise to sundown. After a moment to catch my breath, it is now time for some late afternoon fun here at The Button Blog.
Yesterday, in lesson 4 of our ongoing Button University series, we discussed design standards for button machines and gave you the reasons why ours have the best button machine design available on the market. Today, we are going to dive feet first into cutters. And if you are a graduate of Indiana University, no, this post does not have anything to do with the Cutters race team or the Little 500.
(Raise your hand if you understood that reference? The movie Breaking Away? Anyone? Okay, not many hands up. I hear crickets. Let’s just move along now, shall we?)
So, let’s say that you are getting ready to start a button project. You have your button machine, you have all of your button supplies, and you even have sheets of neatly printed circular graphics ready to go. Are you ready to start making buttons?
Not so fast. Your gorgeous and beautiful graphics must be cut out!
How are you going to accomplish this?
A lot of people to whom I pose that question instantly respond by saying, “Scissors!” To which I reply, “Scissors? Really? You want to make 250 pinback buttons and you are going to try and cut out 250 circular graphics with scissors?” Not only will scissor cutting be laborious and tedious work, but it will undoubtedly lead to defective buttons if your precision is not spot on with each cut.
Quite frankly, trying to make any more than 5 or 10 buttons using scissors to cut your graphics will not only be woefully inefficient, it very well may drive you crazy. And in the wonderful world of buttons, the only crazy we allow is you being crazy in lo
ve with your buttons at the end of a project!
Well guess what? We help you avoid driving yourself crazy with scissors because we have three specifically designed cutter products that will allow you to simply and efficiently prepare your graphics for the button machine. The three types are:
- The adjustable rotary circle cutter (included with our beginner button system)
- The professional punch cutter (included with our professional button systems)
- The high volume die-cutting press (the newest addition to our line of cutters)
In a previous blog post, we provided detailed instructions for how to use adjustable circle cutter. No need to recreate that info here, just follow the link to learn all you need to know about this simple process. Fortunately, using a punch cutter or a high volume die-cutting press is just as easy. Here are two videos that show you just how easy our punch cutters and high volume die-cutting presses are to use:
Video: How to Use a Punch Cutter
Video: How to Use a High Volume Die-Cutting Press
So, just make sure that when you are planning your next button making project that the thought, “Hey, let’s use scissors!” never pops into your head. With three perfect cutter options like these to choose from, you can put the scissors back in the drawer and never think about them again when you’re making buttons.
As always, thanks for stopping by for today’s Button University lesson. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’re going to talk about button paper and give you some helpful hints regarding what types of paper make the best buttons. See you tomorrow!
Brighid Brown – Director of Blogging and All Things Cool at ABM